Rate My Professor Michelle Smith

Michelle Smith is an Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Writing in the Department of English at Clemson University’s College of Arts and Humanities. She earned her Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition from Pennsylvania State University in 2010, an M.A. in English from the same institution in 2006, and a B.A. in English from the University of Richmond in 2004. Before arriving at Clemson in 2017 as an Assistant Professor, she held positions as Assistant Professor of English at Marist College from 2012 to 2017 and as Assistant Professor of English and Composition Director at Whitworth University from 2011 to 2012. Smith teaches courses in rhetorical theory, feminist rhetorics and methodologies, material rhetorics, and utopian literature.

Her research focuses on feminist rhetorics, historiography, women’s work, archives, and utopianism, with particular attention to rhetorics of gendered labor in contexts such as nineteenth-century U.S. utopian communities and World War II recruitment efforts. Smith’s monograph, Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women’s Work in the Early Industrial Age, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2021 and earned an honorable mention for the Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition in 2022. She co-edited The Responsibilities of Rhetoric: Selected Papers from the 2008 Rhetoric Society of America Conference (Waveland Press, 2009). Notable publications include “Feminist Rhetorical Questions and the Broadening Imperative” in College English (2020), “‘Indoor Duties’ in Utopia: Archival Recalcitrance and Methodologies of Lived Experience” in College English (2018), and “In Rosie’s Shadow: WWII Recruitment Rhetoric and Women’s Work in Public Memory” in Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Smith has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 2024 for research on Rosie the Riveter, another NEH Summer Stipend in 2012, the Idol-South Award from Clemson’s Department of English in 2021, and the Center for Communal Studies Prize in 2007. She has presented at major conferences including the Rhetoric Society of America and Conference on College Composition and Communication, and serves on committees such as the Clemson University Commission on Women.