ABSTRACT
The careers of fi gures such as Theresa Enos provide benchmarks for plotting developments in rhetoric and composition, including the evolving relations between the two. If we take the establishment of the fi rst graduate programs in the 1970s as an initial point of reference, we can chart formative trends by the founders of those programs. Theresa studied with Jim Corder and Gary Tate in the program at Texas Christian, which was founded in 1973, three years after Ed Corbett instituted a program at Ohio State, and a year after Ross Winterowd established one at the University of Southern California. By the end of 1980, over twenty doctoral programs had been created, including James Kinneavy’s at the University of Texas at Austin, Art Young’s at Carnegie Mellon, and Janice Lauer’s at Purdue. These programs were fi rst surveyed in 1980 by two studies: Janice Lauer’s “Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric” and Covino, Johnson, and Feehan’s “Graduate Education in Rhetoric” (which reported on twenty doctoral programs). As is evident in their titles, both articles characterize the fi eld by the study of rhetoric. A fuller sense of what was actually being studied in the thirty-eight doctoral programs that were established before 1987 is provided by Chapman and Tate’s (1987) survey of curricula. These surveys, and the three that Theresa coauthored in subsequent decades, provide the richest documentary records we have of how our graduate curricula have evolved over the last three decades. Those surveys are only one example of how Theresa’s research has mapped out formative trends in our fi eld. She has co-edited
collections on writing program administration and the histories of rhetoric, including two volumes on the New Rhetorics. She has also published a collection of personal refl ections from leading scholars, and another book that examines the personal dimensions of the profession by surveying the experiences of female faculty. Together, these books provide an exceptionally rich and detailed picture of our discipline, as we hope this collection will help to demonstrate.
