Dr. Miriam Fernandez, Professor, Department of English

CSUSB CAL Talks

During this episode on the College of Arts and Letters Podcast Series we spend time with Miriam Fernandez, PhD who recently received her promotion to Professor in the CSUSB English Department.
What is the difference between writing and composition? This expert puts it plain and easy to understand and practice. Her stance? Everyone can write!
Her current research focuses on Chicanx rhetorical practices and the rhetorical uses of Llorona storytelling. One of her research projects looks at the uses of epideictic rhetoric among Chicanas in the 1970s and 1980s as they reshaped the meaning of a Chicana feminist identity and claimed a feminist heritage going back to the colonization of Mexico. Another project she is currently working on analyzes the rhetorical purposes of Llorona storytelling. This project is an oral history project that records Mexican and Chicanx people's memories of hearing the Llorona story and analyzes the reasons why people choose to retell the story or to stop sharing the story with new generations.

One of her teaching interests is in the structure and writing of researched arguments. Dr. Fernandez likes to work with students as they analyze how arguments are structured in academic and public or popular texts and guide them as they write their own arguments. My second teaching interest is in the intersection of rhetorical studies and public sphere theories.

Link to La Llorona and Rhetorical Haunting Essay: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26878003.2021.1881310?scroll=top&needAccess=true