Who is Patricia Bizzell

Patricia Bizzell is Reverend John E. Brooks Professor of Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross. A Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, where she has taught since 1978 as well as founded and directed the Writer's Workshop, a peer tutoring facility, and a writing-across-the-curriculum program. She has directed the College Honors and English Honors programs and chaired the English Department. She teaches courses in first-year composition, rhetoric and public speaking, nineteenth-century American literature and women's literature.

She is also a past president of the Rhetoric Society of America.

She describes her research interests as:

"Among my current research interests is the question of how the increasing diversification of academic discourses affects the teaching of writing to college students. A recent publication in this area is the collection ALT/DIS, co-edited with Helen Fox and Christopher Schroeder, and my essay in that volume. Also, I am interested in women's rhetoric, particularly in nineteenth-century America. Some of my work in this area can be found in the selections by women included in the second edition (2001) of The Rhetorical Tradition, co-authored with Bruce Herzberg.A newer interest is Jewish rhetoric, e.g the Jewish-Christian disputation at Barcelona in 1262 and the civil rights rhetoric of Abraham Joshua Heschel."

Photo courtesy of Holy Cross where Bizzell is on the faculty.