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.

Author. My new book, The Erotic as Rhetorical Power: Archives of Romantic Friendship between Women Teachers (2024), is out with the Ohio State University Press. My first book, Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education (2019), was published with the University of South Carolina Press and is now available open access. I’m currently working on a third book project about Rachel Carson and queer memory. I’ve published from this new research in the Quarterly Journal of Speech and Women’s Studies in Communication.

Award-winning scholar. My work has been recognized with the 2015 Charles Kneupper Award from the Rhetoric Society of America, the 2020 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award Honorable Mention from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric & Composition, the 2021 Randy Majors Memorial Award from the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Caucus on GLBTQ Concerns, the 2025 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from NCA’s Public Address Division, and the 2026 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

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 lifting weights, hiking, and trail running in the woods. I am especially fond of Rothrock State Forest and the Rachel Carson Trail.