I started my career in nonprofit development six months after receiving my PhD in English, with an emphasis in Writing History and Theory, from Case Western Reserve University in May 2022. This site began as a portfolio of my academic work and teaching, and I’m keeping these areas alive as an archive of what I consider my first career. The teaching and research I did in these years remain important to me, even if I no longer work as an academic.
My academic research spanned the fields of rhetoric and professional communication by examining the strategies food writers use to convey expertise, credibility, and professionalism, particularly when they write from historically-marginalized or extra-institutional positions. At the center of this work is a reformulation of ethos as arising through the interaction of and engagement between writer and reader, rather than existing as a discreet property of communication. I see cookbooks, food memoirs, and food blogs as sites where food writers evoke and negotiate the individual and social identities of themselves and their readers. Other scholarly interests included cultural rhetorics; identity, social privilege, and diversity in the writing classroom; and the shifting roles played by writers, readers, and genres in the process of meaning-making.
I received my M.A. in English Literature with a Certificate in the Teaching of Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and my B.A. in English (with a minor in Hispanic Studies) from the College of Saint Benedict.
I currently work as a Development Researcher for the University of Minnesota Foundation.
Brita M. Thielen 