Villanueva bio
Dr. Victor Villanueva is Regents Professor and Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Washington State University. He has served as co-Director of the Greater Kansas City Writing Project, Director of Composition, English Department Chair at two institutions, Interim Associate Dean, and Director of American Studies. He currently serves as the Director of the University Writing Program.
Dr. Villanueva is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books and dozens of articles and book chapters. Among his books is the award-winning Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2013 CE, and Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, one of the most-adopted books for the training of English teachers of writing in the U.S. and abroad.
Over the years, Dr. Villanueva has received a number of honors, including the Richard A. Meade Award for Distinguished Research in English Education (1994), the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship in English (1995), Rhetorician of the Year (1999), the Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award (2008), and the national organization’s Exemplar Award (2009). Within Washington State University, he has received the Martin Luther King Distinguished Service Award (1999), the Meyer Distinguished Professorship (2004), and the Sahlin Faculty Excellence Award for Research, Scholarship, and the Arts (2005). Graduate Students declared him Mentor of the Year in American Studies (2009), Most Supportive Faculty Member (1998 and 2010), and declared his graduate seminar the year’s best on three occasions (2000, 2006, and 2010).
And all of these efforts center on the connections between language and relations of power, especially racism.
Selected Accomplishments
Recent and Noteworthy Publications
- On Language and Value: Political Economies of Rhetoric and Composition (with Wendy Olson and Siskanna Naynaha), Provo: Utah State UP, forthcoming, 2016.
- “I am Two Parts”: Collective Subjectivity and the Leader of Academics and the Othered, College English, forthcoming, 2016.
- “Puerto Rico: A Neoliberal Crucible” Journal of Cultural Economics (UK), November 2014 (8:1) 1-13. Online: August 2014.
- A Language and Power Anthology: Representations of Race in a “Post-Racist” Era (with Robert Eddy), Provo: Utah State UP, 2014.
- “Subversive Complicity and Basic Writing Across the Curriculum,” Journal of Basic Writing, 32:1, 2013, 1-14.
- “Rhetoric, Racism, and the Remaking of Knowledge Making in Composition.” The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Lance Massey and Richard Gebhart (eds.), Provo: Utah State UP, 2011.
- Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Graduate Reader, 3rd edition (with Kristin Arola for the 3rd edition), Urbana: NCTE (1997, 2003), 2011.
Recent National and Regional Awards
- “Subversive Complicity and Basic Writing Across the Curriculum,” Journal of Basic Writing, selected for inclusion in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals 2014 (Parlor Press).
- “’For rhetoric, the text is the world in which we find ourselves’: A Conversation with Victor Villanueva,” Composition Forum, Spring 2012.
- Exemplar, Conference on College Composition and Communications, 2009.
- Advancement of People of Color Leadership Award, National Council of Teachers of English, 2008.
Recent Presentations
- “Mode-Meshing? Considerations on Ancient Rhetorics, Conference on College Composition and Communication, Houston, 7 April 2016.
- “Basic Writers and the Continued Rhetoric of the Deficient Student,” Student Successes Symposium, San Marcos, TX, 5 January 2015.
- “The Latino, Our Languages, and the Rhetoric of Exclusion,” the Latino Networks of Portland, Portland, 30 October 2015.
- “Honoring our Heritage; Building our Future,” In Honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month, University of Southern Indiana, 24 September 2015.