Christina Cedillo, Ph.D.

Biography

Christina V. Cedillo serves as Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and co-Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She/they earned a Ph.D. in English with a concentration in Rhetoric and Composition and a certificate in Women's and Gender Studies from Texas A&M University. Before joining the UHCL Writing program, she taught at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, a Native American-Serving Institution.

Dr. Cedillo's research focuses on intersections of race, gender, and disability to examine the impact of legal, scientific, and popular discourses on marginalized populations; strategic uses of multimodality and digital technologies; and critical pedagogical approaches that advance access for all students. She is a recipient of the UHCL President’s Distinguished Faculty Award in Research, the Center for Faculty Development's Texas Research & Scholarship Award, and the Center for Faculty Development's Scholarship to Improve Higher Education Award. In 2021, she received the National Council of Teachers of English Leadership Award for People with Disabilities.

Dr. Cedillo is a co-founder and current lead editor of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, a digital, open-access venue dedicated to the study of multimodality in everyday life. They also serve on the advisory board of the University of South Carolina Press book series, "Movement Rhetoric/Rhetoric's Movements," and on several editorial boards of journals that include Constellations: A Cultural Rhetorics Publishing Space, Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and Literacy in Composition Studies. As a member of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, they have served on the organization's Executive Committee, and were co-chair of the Latinx Caucus and the Committee on Disability Issues.

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Areas of Expertise

• Histories of Rhetoric (Ancient to 1750)
• Cultural rhetorics
• Latinx/e rhetorics
• Disability rhetorics
• Multimodality
• Rhetorics of embodiment/embodied rhetorics
• Critical pedagogy

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Publications

• "The Problem of Ethos and Exigence in Latin American Indigenous Women’s Rhetorics." Published in Rhetorica Rising: Feminist Rhetorical Methods for Social Change (2025).
  
  
• "On Embodied Rhetorical Choices; Or, Cultivating a Decolonial Approach to Publishing." Published in Decolonial Possibilities: Indigenously Rooted Practices in Rhetoric and Writing (2025).
  
  
• "'[S]treite unto my myrrowr and my glas': Disability Rhetorics and Intersubjectivity in Hoccleve's 'My
  Compleinte.'" Published in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric (2024).
  
  
• "Racism and/as Ableism and the Rhetorical Syzygy of Exclusion." Published in the Routledge Ethnicity and Race in Communication Handbook (2023).
  
  
• "Writing with Our Bodies: Recovering Pathos through Critical Embodiment Pedagogy." Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times (2023).
  
  
• "#DisabilityTooWhite: On Erasure’s Material and Physical Dimensions." Published in Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal (2022).

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Courses (Current Academic Year)

Fall 2025

• WRIT 3307: Advanced Writing
  
• WRIT 3312: Written Communications in Business

Spring 2026

• WRIT 1302: Composition II
  
• WRIT 3312: Written Communications in Business

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Research Projects

Rhetorical (Dis)Location: Space, Time, and Tropes of Domination. [working title] Drawing on critical race studies, disability studies, and decolonial theories, this monograph theorizes spatiotemporal tropes that influence how marginalized rhetors are perceived and how their messages are received.
Embodying the Struggle: The Multimodal Rhetorics of Women of Color Activists. Drawing on critical race studies, women of color feminisms, and multimodal rhetorics, this monograph examines how Black, Native, and Latinx women activists of the 20th and 21st centuries have engaged multimodal rhetorics and technologies to secure public platforms and promote social justice. (Monograph project, in progress)

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Awards and Accomplishments

• UHCL President's Distinguished Faculty Award in Research, 2024.
  
  
• Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon) Teaching Fellow, 2022-2023.
  
  
• NCTE Leadership Award for People with Disabilities, National Council of Teachers of English, 2021.
  
  
• Texas Research & Scholarship Award winner, UHCL Center for Faculty Development.
  
  
• Scholarship to Improve Higher Education Award winner, UHCL Center for Faculty Development.

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