Role: Professor and Vice Chair, Ohio State University
Columbus, OH

  Contact: hesford.1@osu.edu

  Research Interests:
Modern and Contemporary Rhetorical Theory | Human Rights Studies | Visual Culture Transnational Feminist Studies

Wendy Hesford is Vice Chair of English and Chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee at The Ohio State University, where she teaches courses in Human Rights Law and Literature, Transnational Feminist Rhetoric, Methods, and Media Cultures, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Children and War. While at Emory, Hesford engaged colleagues working at the intersections of feminist studies, vulnerability, and human rights to advance her work on her book project, “Exceptional Rhetorics: Children’s Human Rights and States of Exception.” “Exceptional Rhetorics” examines representations of the rights of children identified as living in-between or outside of citizenship. Hesford shared her research on child soldiers and how the discourse of human rights maps vulnerability onto certain children’s bodies—but not others--and how these bodies take on the burden of representation in domestic and international politics and law.

Hesford is the author of Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2011), winner of the 2012 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award. She is co-editor with Wendy Kozol of two collections: Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the "Real" (University of Illinois Press, 2001), and Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, The Politics of Representation (Rutgers University Press, 2005). She has published and forthcoming essays and reviews in a range of journals, PMLA, Biography, College English, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, Modern Drama, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Sexualities, and TDR: Journal of Performance Studies, among others.