People
Center Graduate Students: Christa Olson
Christa Olson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Writing Studies in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Contact Information
315 English Building| MC-718
333-1335
cjolson2@illinois.edu
Biographical Statement
My academic and professional background is in the arts, specifically performance. On the academic side, I have a self-designed B.A. from St. Olaf College's Paracollege entitled "Finding Voice: Creative Expression as a Tool for Social Justice" and an M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University. From 2002 – 2005 I taught undergraduate art students in an off-campus, experiential education program called City Arts that focuses on the roles that art and artists play in society. Between 2000 and 2005, I worked as a theater technician in the New York and Minneapolis, MN arts communities.
Research Interests
- Rhetorical criticism and theory, historiography, ethnography;
- Visual rhetoric, visual culture, the arts;
- Constitutive rhetoric, democracies, nations & nationalism, publics;
- Latin America (especially Ecuador), rhetorics of culture
My current project traces Ecuador's long history of imagining the nation through images of indigenous people. It examines how those images became tenacious, resilient visual commonplaces that helped constitute a national public that often, paradoxically, marginalized indigenous citizenship.
Course Taught
- RHET 100
- RHET 101
- RHET 102
- RHET 233