Sara VanderHaagen
Associate Professor, Graduate Program Director
Communication
Johnston Hall 227
Education
PhD, Communication Studies, Northwestern University
MA, Communication Studies, Northwestern University
BA, Communication Arts and Sciences and Philosophy, Calvin College
Research Interests
My research focuses on how members of the public use rhetoric to argue about and reshape stories about the past. I am especially interested in how public discourse about the past is affected by the dynamics of race, gender, age, and agency. Broader areas of interest include African American rhetoric, public discourse about race and gender, rhetorical theory and rhetorical criticism.
VanderHaagen, S. C. (2021, February). Review of "Practicing Citizenship: Women’s Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair". , 44(1). Women’s Studies in Communication.
VanderHaagen, S. C. (2021, January (1st Quarter/Winter)). “‘A Grand Sisterhood’: Black American Women Speakers at the 1893 World’s Congress of Representative Women”. Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Bloomfield, E. F., & VanderHaagen, S. C. (2021, July (3rd Quarter/Summer)). Where Women Scientists Belong: Placing Feminist Memory in Biography Collections for Children. Women’s Studies in Communication.
VanderHaagen, S. (2020, April (2nd Quarter/Spring)). Review of "Remembering Emmett Till". , 106(2), 205-209. Quarterly Journal of Speech.
VanderHaagen, S. (2019, April (2nd Quarter/Spring)). (Mis)Quoting King: Commemorative Stewardship and Ethos in the Controversy over the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. Argumentation and Advocacy.
VanderHaagen, S. (2018, November). Children’s Biographies of African American Women: Rhetoric, Public Memory, and Agency. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press.
VanderHaagen, S. (2018, August). A Tale of Two Wheatleys: The Shifting Values of Twentieth-Century Historical Fiction in the Biographical Novels of Shirley Graham and Ann Rinaldi. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 43(3), 240-262.
VanderHaagen, S., & Ray, A. G. (2014, December). A Pilgrim-Critic in the Reconstruction South: Anna Dickinson’s Tour of 1875. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 100(3), 348-72.
VanderHaagen, S. (2013, June). The "Agential Spiral": Reading Public Memory through Paul Ricoeur. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 46(2), 182-206.