Ashleah Wimberly

I am from a small place in the Southern US that you've likely never heard of - and before you ask, I actually love the weather up here! I'm a 1st generation college graduate with a deep love for tea, games, and all manner of nerdy niche topics.

My research emerges from my positionality as a multiply-marginalized academic and explores the constellated issues of literacy, identity, and power. I'm particularly interested in how individuals narrate their experiences developing literacy practices across different contexts and roles—because I believe everyone has a story to tell, and these stories reveal both how our experiences shape us and how we shape those experiences through the act of recounting them.

Writing Program Administration
As a WPA, I specialize in developing inclusive, research-backed curricula and equitable assessment practices that center student success. My administrative work focuses on creating sustainable support structures for instructors—particularly graduate teaching assistants—through mentoring programs, professional development workshops, and accessible pedagogical resources. I'm committed to fostering collaborative communities where administrators, teachers, and students can all thrive.

Graduate Instructor Development
My dissertation, A Constellation of Stories: Liminality & Transition in the Experiences of Graduate Student Instructors, uses interpretive phenomenological analysis and critical incident technique to examine how marginalized graduate instructors navigate their simultaneous roles as students, teachers, scholars, and professionals. This work explores how "small, potent gestures" of mentorship shape disciplinary becoming, how intersecting identities and precarious working conditions affect literacy practices and program engagement, and how graduate instructors translate their own learning experiences into teaching practices.

Anti-Racist and Decolonial Rhetorical Theory
My scholarly approach is deeply informed by postcolonial theory and anti-racist rhetorical frameworks. I'm invested in recovering marginalized voices from rhetorical history, particularly Black women educators whose work exemplifies what I call "quiet defiance"—radical inclusion and community-centered activism that operated strategically within oppressive systems. My work on Lucy Craft Laney and the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute explores how educators navigated tensions between strategic silence and sustainable practice to create transformative educational spaces that resisted both-and binaries of racial uplift discourse.

This work extends to examining how colonial logics and power structures shape contemporary rhetorical practices and institutional spaces. I'm interested in how individuals negotiate dominant literacy practices while maintaining the unique literacy practices they bring with them—what I think of as developing rhetorical awareness that opens up new possibilities rather than requiring assimilation to a single standard. My teaching and scholarship both emphasize helping students and instructors recognize the linguistic biases we all carry and become critically conscious of how we use and interpret language across cultural contexts.

Digital Rhetoric and Procedural Analysis
I investigate representation and circulation in visual and digital media, examining how individuals, communities, and cultures are depicted—and sometimes erased—in contemporary media. My recent work analyzes procedural rhetoric in interactive media, exploring how video games and digital platforms encode ideological arguments through their systems and mechanics, not just their content. Drawing on frameworks like techno-Orientalism and postcolonial critique, I examine how digital spaces can simultaneously promise posthuman possibility while systematically reinscribing colonial and racialized tropes. I'm particularly interested in what I call "e[race]sure"—not simple absence of representation, but active, procedural overwriting of cultural identity through interactive systems.

Postcolonial Literature and Circulation Studies
My engagement with postcolonial literature examines how writers navigate questions of identity, trauma, and resistance within and against colonial frameworks. I'm drawn to texts that explore the tension between memory and forgetting, the fragmentation of colonized subjectivity, and the possibilities for reclaiming identity through art and narrative. Earlier work has examined how contemporary postcolonial writers use form and structure to embody colonial violence and resistance—for instance, analyzing how visual and textual disruption in experimental narratives mirrors the disruption of colonized identity, or how characters reclaim agency through creative practice in contexts of displacement and erasure.

Courses Taught at NDSU

ENGL 120: College Composition II

ENGL 458: Advanced Writing Workshop

ENGL 755: Composition Theory

ENGL 764: Teaching Workshop for Writing Instructors

Upper-Division Writing Courses Taught at Other Institutions

Unflattening Rhetorical Theory & Practice

Global Rhetorics: Firing the Canon

Article & Essay Technique: Creative Nonfiction

Writing/Editing in Print & Online: Kairotic Technologies

Writing/Editing in Print & Online: Algorithms & Access