Curriculum Vita
Academic Appointments
University of California, Santa Barbara
Assistant Teaching Professor, Writing Program, 2023-Present
Methodist University
Assistant Professor of English, Department of English, Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, 2021-2023
Clemson University
Assistant Director of First-Year Writing, Department of English, 2019-2020
Graduate Teacher of Record, Department of English, 2017-2021
Suzhou University
Instructor, Summer 2016 and Summer 2017
Washington State University
Graduate Teaching Instructor, Department of English, 2015-2017
Education
Clemson University
PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design. August 2021.
Dissertation Title: Altared Bodies: Evangelical Purity Rhetorics in the Age of Sexual Politics
Committee: Cynthia Haynes, chair; Victor Villanueva; Michelle Smith; Elizabeth Jemison
European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland
PhD, Audit: Philosophy, Art, and Social Thought, Summer 2018.
Graduate Courses: “Levinas” with Diane Davis; “Psychoanalysis and Sexuality” with Alenka Zupančič
Washington State University
MA in Rhetoric and Composition. May 2017.
Certificate, Teaching English as a Second Language, 2017.
Roberts Wesleyan College
BA in Communication and English. Magna Cum Laude. May 2015.
Selected Publication Activity
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
Houser, Victoria and Özyeşilpınar, Eda. “Your Misogyny is not a Cultural Difference: Constellating Transnational Stories of Religious Gender-Based Violence and Feminist Resistance.” Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space, 2024.
Sawyer, Lauren and Houser, Victoria. “Purity Culture and the Limits of Queer Evangelicalism.” In Theology and Sexuality. Spring 2024.
Houser, Victoria. “Rotten with Consensus: Toward a Dialectic Transformation of Genocide.” In KB Journal: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society. Fall 2019.
Houser, Victoria. “Wrestling the Divine Male: Towards Woman’s Liberation in Sacred Spaces.” In Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric Culture, and Style, vol. 1, no. 2, 2019, pp. pp. 40-49.
Book Chapters
Houser, Victoria. “Corporeal Composition: Memoria and the Discourse of the Body.” Cross-Talking with An American Academic of Color: Essays in Honor of Victor Villanueva, edited by Asao Inoue, Wendy Olson, and Siskanna Naynaha.
Easterbrook, Tyler, Glover-Rijkse, Ragan, Cox, Anicca, and Houser, Victoria. “Starting a First-Year Writing Program during COVID-19: Lessons from a ‘Tech-Light’ Campus” WPA Advocacy in a Pandemic: Lessons Learned, edited by Todd Ruecker, Sheila Carter-Tod, and Heidi Estrem (in press, 2024).
Public Scholarship
Houser, Victoria. “Crisis Pregnancy Centers: How the Evangelical Purity Movement Funded Thousands of Anti-Abortion Clinics.” Canopy Forum: On the Interactions of Law and Religion, 2022.
Creative Nonfiction Essays
Houser, Victoria. “The Weight of Water.” Creation Magazine, 2024.
Houser, Victoria. “Terminal C: Ted Stevens International Airport” in Airplane Reading, 2020.
Reviews
Houser, Victoria. “Review: Such a Pretty Girl: A Story of Struggle Empowerment and Disability Pride.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2021.
Houser, Victoria. “Coding/Learning/Writing: A Cultural Digital Rhetorical Gathering,” In Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, Review of Panel Presentation at Computers and Writing, 2018.
Selected Conference Presentations
“Queer Celibacy: Negotiating Sexual Identity in Religious Rhetorical Space.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. Chicago, IL, February 2023.
“Pure Pregnancy: Changing the Narrative of Crisis Pregnancy Centers,” Rhetoric Society of America, Baltimore, MD, May 2022.
“Reproductive Rhetorics: Changing Feminist Rhetorical Understandings of Survival,” Rhetoric Society of America, Baltimore, MD, May 2022.
“Reproducing Purity: The ‘Ex-Gay’ Movement and Queer Reproductive Futurities,” Religion and Sexual Abuse Project Conference, Riverside, CA, March 2022.
“Norming Woman’s Narrative: Resistance and Radicalism within Conservative Subcultures,” International Association for Biography and Autobiography, June 2020 (accepted).
“Hashtags Speak Back: Thinking through the Body Within Online Disclosures of Sexual Violence,” Computers and Writing, Greenville, NC, May 2020 (accepted).
“‘She Must be Quiet’: Religious Rituals of Divine Male In/Hospitality,” Rhetoric Society of America Convention, Portland, OR, May 2020 (accepted).
“Violence has a Gender”: Sacred Hostipitality and the Boundary of the Church,” Rhetoric Society of America Convention, Portland, OR, May 2020 (accepted).
“Bodies Offshore: A Material Feminist Approach to Writing About and Within the Body,” Conference on College Composition and Communication, Milwaukee, WI, March 2020 (accepted).
“A Liturgy of Remembrance: Sacred Spaces and Woman’s Body,” Memory Studies Association Conference, Madrid, Spain, June 2019.
“Exploration, Play, and Construction with Digital Invention: Pedagogies, Problems, and Potential,” Computers and Writing, East Lansing, MI, June 2019.
“Marks of Terror: Photography, Torture, and the War with Language” Carolina Rhetoric Conference, Raleigh, NC, April 2019.
“A Language of Immanence: Unearthing the Altared Feminine within Religious Rhetoric,” Sponsored Panel Presentation for Rhetoric and Religion Special Interest Group at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2019.
“Performing a Public Faith: Studying the Mundane, the Feminine, and the Digital,” Rhetoric and Religion in the 21st Century, Knoxville, TN, October 2018.
“Boundary Crossing: Tackling Transfer through Remixing Genres in the Multimodal Classroom,” Computers and Writing, Richmond, VA, May 2018.
"Konsult: An Invention-Based Learning Model Sparked by Digital Creativity” Computers and Writing, Fairfax, VA, May 2018.
“Sparking Creativity: Digital Literacies for Your Invention-Based Composition Course,” Computers and Writing, Fairfax, VA, May 2018.
“Vocabularies of Violence: Using Terministic Screens as Praxis for Reconciliation,” Eastern Communication Association, Pittsburgh, PA, April 2018.
“Silence and Genocide: Consensus as Exclusion and Displacement within Rwanda,” Margins Conference, Clemson, SC, March 2018.
“Dissensus and Electracy: Enacting Hospitality in the First-Year Writing Classroom,” Carolina Rhetoric Conference, Clemson, SC Feb 2018.
“Race and Resistance: Using Pop Culture to Approach Topics of Race in First-Year Writing,” Popular Culture Association, San Diego, CA, April 2017.
“A Burkean Analysis of Semantic and Poetic Meaning in The Giver,” Popular Culture Association, Seattle, WA, March 2016.
“The Giver: Deliberative Re-Orientation,” Eastern Communication Association, Philadelphia, PA, April 2015.
Local Presentations
“Rhetorics of Mis/Understanding,” Student Works in Progress, Society of the Third Sophistic, Clemson University, April 2018.
“The Violence of Silencing in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Graduate Research and Discovery Symposium, Clemson University, March 2018.
Teaching Experience
University of California, Santa Barbara
WRIT 105C: Creative Nonfiction Writing
WRIT 105CR: Writing for Cultural Rhetorics
WRIT 109HP: Writing for the Health Professions
WRIT 2: Academic Writing
WRIT 109GS: Writing for Gender Studies
Methodist University
LAN 3100: Introduction to Linguistics
ENGLISH 1010: Composition
ENGLISH 1040: Composition and Rhetoric
ENGLISH 1000: English Fundamentals
Clemson University
ENGLISH 1030: First Year Composition. Aug 2017 – Present.
Awarded the Douglass Teaching Award for excellence in First-Year Composition in Spring 2019.
ENGLISH 3140: Advanced Composition: Technical Writing. Online Course. May 2018 – June 2018.
Washington State University
ENGLISH 105: College Composition for Multilingual Writers. Jan 2017 – May 2017.
ENGLISH 101: First Year Writing, Jan 2016 – Dec 2016.
ENGLISH 102: Writing Tutorial, Aug 2015 – Dec 2015.
Suzhou University (Suzhou, China)
Instructor, College Writing for Multilingual Writers. Summer 2016, Summer 2017.
Grants and Awards
Religious Communication Association, Top Dissertation Award (finalist), 2022
Victor J. Vitanza RCID Outstanding Dissertation Award, $1,000, 2022
Douglass Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching First-Year Writing, 2019
Research Micro-Grant, American Society for the History of Rhetoric, $50, 2020
Graduate Travel Grant, Conference on College Composition and Communication, $750, 2020
Graduate Travel Grant, Conference for Computers and Writing, $750, 2019
Graduate Travel Grant, Conference on College Composition and Communication, $750, 2019
Academic Service
National Service
Submission Reviewer, Rhetoric Society of America Conference
Submission Reviewer, Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chair, Carolina Rhetoric Conference
Submission Reviewer, Best of The Journals in Rhetoric and Composition
Journal Reviewer, Disability Studies Quarterly
Committee Member, Writing Program Administration: Graduate Organization
Methodist University
Chair, Curriculum Committee
Committee member, Institutional Review Board
Senator, Faculty Senate
Committee member, Writing Program Curriculum Committee
First-Year Writing Curriculum Revision Task Force
Faculty Sponsor, Monarch Review: Undergraduate Research Journal
Clemson University
Committee Member, First-Year Writing Curriculum Review
President, Society of the Third Sophistic (S3S) Graduate Organization
Professional Development Coordinator, S3S Graduate Organization
Collaborator, Digital Rhetoric Pilot for English 1030
Online Student Coordinator, S3S Graduate Organization
Washington State University
Graduate Student Representative, Graduate and Professional Student Association
Collaborator, First-Year Focus program (supporting first-generation students in FYW)
Reviewer, Textual Overtures: Encompassing the Teaching, Interpretation, and Production of Texts
Professional Associations
Rhetoric Society of America
College Composition and Communication
Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition
Organization for Research on Women in Communication
American Society for the History of Rhetoric
Purity Culture Research Collective