Dr. Kate Siegfried is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies. Her research broadly engages rhetoric, race, philosophies of materialism, imperialism, international studies, and geography. Her current research highlights how racialized contexts of containment (such as political exile, settler-colonialism, and incarceration) shape the rhetorical resources available for international political struggles against racism, settler-colonialism, and imperialism.
Her current book project, tentatively titled Rhetorics of Exile: Emergent Cartographies of Liberation, is supported by funding from the Waterhouse Institute for the Study of Communication and Society at Villanova University and the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan and engages archival materials from archives in the United States, Ireland, and South Africa. The rhetorical cartographies mapped in Rhetorics of Exile demonstrates the constitutive and communicative role exile played in Black and decolonial politics globally, while also charting the boundaries of the possibility for emancipation writ large during the Cold War era. She has also published work on queer and feminist social movements, reproductive justice, Marxist philosophy, Black internationalism, and the state logics of settler-colonialism. Her research can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies in Communication, Cultural Critique, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech, among other journals.
Representative Publications
Siegfried, K. (in press). “Radio Free Dixie from Cuba to The Black Belt: Mapping Black Nationhood Through Cartographies of Sonic Rhetoric.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
Siegfried, K. (in press). “‘Our Right to Travel’: Charting a Black Internationalist Rhetorical Cartography in Paul Robeson’s 1952 Border Concert.” Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture.
Siegfried, K. (2023). “Cramped Space: Finding Rebellious Potential in Fixed Capital During the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971.” Cultural Critique 120.
Dubriwny, T. and Siegfried, K. (2021). “Justifying Abortion: The Limits of Maternal Idealist Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 107.2.
Siegfried, Kate. (2020). “Making Settler-Colonialism Concrete: Agentive Materialism & Habitational Violence in Palestine.” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 17.3.