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 Dr. Loretta Ramirez is Associate Professor of Latinx Rhetoric & Composition. Her research includes historical rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, multimodal rhetoric, art history, archival methodologies, decolonial theory, Chicana literature, creative writing, and critical composition pedagogy. In 2020, she was awarded the Scholars for the Dream Award by the Conference on College Composition & Communication. 

Her first book, The Wound and the Stitch: A Genealogy of the Female Body from Medieval Iberia to SoCal Chicanx Art (Penn State UP, 2024) offers a historical rhetorical genealogy informed by insights Dr. Ramirez has gained while teaching within a multi-disciplinary ethnic studies department wherein she engages in Chicana rhetorical studies, decolonial theory and methodology, feminist studies, art history, and critical pedagogy. The Wound and the Stitch specifically examines Chicana rhetoric that focuses on the phenomenon of woundedness and a stitching together of fragmented selves. The book maps a historical genealogy by linking late-medieval female Iberian devotional rhetoric to expressions of fragmented female bodies in contemporary Chicana self-representational strategies. Dr. Ramirez traces construction of such rhetoric by interweaving connections between this Iberian genealogy and Mesoamerican concepts of securing stability during lived turmoil. The goal of this historical rhetorical genealogy is to claim that a ubiquitous form of Chicana self-representation strategies, notably manifested in late-twentieth-century Californian print media and art, positions woundedness to generatively express Chicana realities and transform the self.

Loretta is currently preparing for publication her second book, Get Back to Where You Once Belonged: A Chicana-Apache Professor’s Autoethnography on Racial and Rhetorical Belongings. Recalling second-wave feminist notions that the personal is political, Get Back employs autoethnography to reflect on intersectionality as impetus for inquiry & social confrontation within ethnic studies discourses & decolonial frameworks. Loretta’s story offers a personal lens to detect biopolitical forces that curtail Chicanx wellness by exploring her family as a fragment of a community ruptured by the Vietnam-American War. She traces these wounds to her sense of racial & rhetorical unbelonging as a first-generation student & professor whose academic pathway results from wartime uprooting.