Hannah Rule

Dr. Hannah J. Rule is Associate Professor of English (Composition and Rhetoric) at the University of South Carolina and a McCausland Faculty Fellow within the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in first-year writing, writing and embodiment, survey of composition studies, and the teaching of writing.

Education

• Ph.D., Rhetoric and Composition, University of Cincinnati

Research Focus

Rule’s scholarship centers on composition studies and pedagogies, with particular attention to writing process theory, multimodality, rhetorical grammar, expressivism, writing technologies, and the material culture of writing. Her work interrogates how composing processes unfold as embodied, situated activities and how this understanding can reshape writing instruction toward context-sensitivity, improvisation, and relationality.

Across her books and articles, she brings feminist and material-culture lenses to bear on everyday writing artifacts—from notebooks and ink to digital interfaces—advocating for pedagogies that honor difference, improvisation, and the lived materialities of literacy.

Publication Trajectory

Rule’s recent output (2018–2024) evidences sustained engagement with revision practices, embodied composing, and material rhetorics. Situating Writing Processes (2019) reframes process pedagogy away from linear strategy toward responsive improvisation, while the co-edited volume The Material Culture of Writing (2022) unites material culture studies with writing research to expand conceptions of genre, identity, and writing work. The forthcoming Writing Artifacts (with Cydney Alexis) will continue this interdisciplinary conversation.

Honors & Recognition

• McCausland Faculty Fellow, University of South Carolina

Teaching & Mentorship

Rule regularly teaches courses ranging from first-year honors rhetoric to doctoral seminars in composition theory and research. Her pedagogy emphasizes reflective, embodied practice and inclusive classroom communities; she mentors graduate students through writing-group models explicitly framed as feminist practice.

Labs, Teams & Future Work

Rule currently collaborates with Cydney Alexis on the edited collection Writing Artifacts, extending their material-culture research. She continues to lead writing-focused working groups that function as both scholarly collectives and feminist mentorship networks, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue across history, literature, museum studies, and writing studies.