Lead Faculty Advisor
bloompoj@uwm.edu
Faculty Webpage
Rachel Bloom-Pojar, PhD (she/her/ella) is an Associate Professor with the programs in Rhetoric, Professional Writing, and Community Engagement in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Rachel is a bilingual, qualitative researcher and teacher whose work focuses on Latinx community health, trust, reproductive justice, and language access. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas and has over 12 years of experience with community-engaged research. Her first book, Translanguaging outside the Academy: Negotiating Rhetoric and Healthcare in the Spanish Caribbean, was published with the NCTE Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series in 2018. It discusses the negotiation of Spanish varieties, medical terminology, and translation practices within the context of a rural, summer health program. Her other published work can be found in Community Literacy Journal, Reflections, Present Tense, the Journal of Applied Communication Research, and the Routledge edited collection, Methodologies for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine.
Rachel is the director of Cuentos de Confianza, a bilingual community writing project featuring stories written by promotores de salud who work with reproductive and sexual health education and advocacy in Wisconsin and Puerto Rico. She is also currently working on a book project based on a four-year ethnographic project about confianza (trust/confidence), promotores de salud (health promoters), and reproductive justice.