Pamela VanHaitsma

Associate Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences (CAS) and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Penn State. I serve as the Director of Graduate Studies in CAS, and I teach courses in rhetorical theory, gender and communication, archival methods, and feminist and queer rhetorics.

Award-winning author. I’m working on a third book project about Rachel Carson and queer memory. I’ve published from this research in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2026) and Women’s Studies in Communication (2026).

My second book, The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers (2024), received the 2025 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from the National Communication Association’s Public Address Division as well as the 2026 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

My first book, Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education (2019), was recognized with the 2020 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award Honorable Mention from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.

ART mom. My spouse and I conceived our amazing kiddos using assisted reproductive technologies and donor gametes. I’ve started to write about this process of family building as an academic in “Ticking Clocks: Rhetorics of Tenure and (In)Fertility,” co-authored with my friend Steph Ceraso for Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Outdoorsy sneaker femme. I spend my free time hiking and trail running in the woods. I am especially fond of Rothrock State Forest and the Rachel Carson Trail.