Carolyn Skinner teaches courses in rhetoric (the study of how people use messages to influence others, build community and shape worldviews), including Arts of Persuasion; Rhetorics of Health, Illness and Wellness; and Methods for the Study of Writing, Rhetoric and Literacy. Her research focuses on historical scientific, professional and medical writing in the 19th-century United States, especially that by and about women. She has examined how early women physicians claimed the authority and expertise to write persuasively as doctors at a time when “woman” and “medical professional” were believed to be incompatible. She has also explored how 19th-century men and women used medical/scientific arguments in the debate over women's rights. Most recently, she has investigated rhetorical reception (how audiences use a text that they read to inform, support or inspire their own persuasive writing) as an important form of communicative activity. Throughout her rhetorical research, Skinner seeks to understand how medical/scientific/professional discourses affected women’s social position and how women themselves used those discourses to affect the world around them.

Skinner is also studying how different methods of assigning incoming students to first-year writing courses affect student success.

Selected Publications

• Rhetorical Reception: 150 Years of Arguing with Sex in Education. Parlor P, 2025.
• “Theorizing Reception: Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s Response to Evolutionary Theory.” Rhetoric Review, vol 43, no. 4. 2024, pp. 303-18.
• “It Takes a Campus: Agility in the Development of Directed Self-Placement.” Co-written with Kelly Whitney. Journal of Writing Assessment, vol. 17, no. 1, 2024, pp. 1-18.
• Women Physicians and Professional Ethos in Nineteenth-Century America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2014.
• "A Physiological Education: Audience Constitution and the Construction of Gender in Sex in Education." College English, vol. 81, no. 6, 2019, pp. 485-507.
• “Medical Discovery as Suffrage Justification in Mary Putnam Jacobi’s 1894 New York Campaign Rhetoric.” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 19.3 (2016): 251-275.
• “Incompatible Rhetorical Expectations: Julia W. Carpenter’s Medical Society Papers, 1895-1899.” Technical Communication Quarterly 21.4 (2012): 307-324.
• “‘She Will Have Science’: Ethos and Audience in Mary Gove’s Lectures to Ladies." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39.3 (2009): 240-259.
• “‘The Purity of Truth’: Nineteenth-Century American Women Physicians Write about Delicate Topics.” Rhetoric Review 26.2 (2007): 103-119.

Curriculum Vitae