Victor Villanueva
Regents Professor
Biography
Victor Villanueva received his PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1986. Since then, he has worked not only as a professor of rhetoric and writing, but as an Equal Opportunity Program Director, Writing Project Director, a Director of Composition, twice as Department Chair (at Washington State University and at Auburn University), and Interim Associate Dean. He also headed the national organization for Writing and Rhetoric, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and was the chair of its annual meeting. He is the current editor for Rhetoric and Composition Studies’ premier monograph series: Studies in Writing and Rhetoric. These efforts and his publications have not only garnered him the exclusive rank of Regents Professor, but have had him declared the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor in Liberal Arts, have had him awarded the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Research, Scholarship, and the Arts, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Distinguished Service Award. He was declared Rhetorician of the Year in 1999 by the Young Rhetoricians, declared the discipline’s Exemplar by the Conference on College Composition in 2009, received the first National Council of Teachers of English Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award in 2008, the 1995 National Council of Teachers of English David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship in English, and the Conference on English Education’s Richard A. Meade Award for Distinguished Research in English Education. Most recently (2011 & 2012), one of his publications—“Colonial Memory and the Crime of Rhetoric: Pedro Albizu Campos"—has been twice chosen as the campus-wide common reading at Buffalo State University.
Publications
Villanueva has written, edited, or co-edited six books and has two more under contract. Among his books are Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, now in its third edition, and Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE (2009). He has edited or co-edited two special editions of College English, has published over 65 articles, book chapters, or reviews, many of which have been anthologized, and he has delivered over 100 presentations, nearly 40 of which have been keynote addresses, including a distinguished visiting professorship address. His current projects concern the connections among rhetoric, political economies, and racism.
Teaching
Villanueva’s thirty years of teaching have included fifteen different undergraduate course topics—from teaching writing to underprepared first-year students, to the connections between literacy and politics, to the rhetorics of racism. He has also taught over a dozen graduate courses—from methods of teaching writing to the rhetorics of political economy. His research interests are reflected in his publications and his teaching.