Tarez Graban

   Assistant Professor of English

   Indiana University

Project: "Beyond Recovery: Feminist Treatise Locations Project”

Tarez Samra Graban is an assistant professor in the Department of English; she is a rhetoric and composition generalist with special interests in discourse studies, feminist theory, and histories of the discipline. Her work lately explores various ways of recasting narratives about how the discipline has formed, including women’s roles in producing, distributing, historicizing, and theorizing their own texts.

Her project, "Beyond Recovery: Feminist Treatise Locations Project” will develop a prototype for an open-source knowledge base that can help to disseminate and visually depict metadata on feminist treatises in rhetoric and composition, looking especially at the contributions of women rhetors, rhetoricians, and teachers from North America’s Progressive Era to the present.

In an effort to expand rhetoric and composition’s disciplinary canon, this knowledge base has three principal aims: (1) to serve as a gathering place for searchable metadata on feminist treatises in rhetoric and composition whose contributions to archival inquiry have yet to be established (including rhetorics, textbooks, primers, or curriculum written by women), especially where such treatises exist as unprocessed or partially processed documents in obscure collections; (2) to visualize and trace the geospatial locations of each treatise, taking into account the frequent and plausible movements of both the authors and their texts, in order to better estimate their possible locations of influence; and (3) to provide more and more varied ways of categorizing authors and their texts so that their contributions to rhetoric and writing instruction become clear, including who were their primary and secondary audiences, and who might be their other agents of research.