Writing professors to explore gender, language with research endowment
UNIVERSITY PRESS RELEASE
University of Houston-Clear Lake Assistant Professors of Writing professors Patricia Droz (left) and Christal Seahorn (right) received the 2017-2018 Marilyn Mieszkuc Professorship in Women’s Studies, an annual endowment that supports faculty research in a variety of disciplines that involve gender issues.
Droz specializes in sociolinguistics, language and gender, and working-class discourse. Seahorn teaches writing and digital rhetoric, with research focuses in composition work that examines the intersections of critical and collaborative pedagogy, and activist rhetoric with a specific concentration on battle speech.
“A Harvard study found that negative news coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails overwhelmed efforts by her 2016 presidential campaign to communicate platform and policy positions,” Seahorn said. “Most coverage criticized her behavior, largely ignoring the email content and the messages they conveyed about her leadership style or diplomatic expertise. Our study will investigate which linguistic strategies are at work, and how Clinton’s discourse affirms or challenges established theories of women in traditionally male-dominated professions.”
The endowment was established in 2003 by university friend Ben Mieszkuc to memorialize his wife, Marilyn, a local attorney and civic leader who strongly supported educational equality for women. She died in 2001.
