Nancy Small

Biography

Nancy studies and teaches about how everyday storytelling constructs our shared life worlds. She serves as team leader for Re-Storying the West, a three-year public humanities project situated at the intersection of rhetoric, Indigenist research ethics, and oral history. In addition to this public-facing work, Nancy is currently writing a monograph that braids strands of archival, rhetorical, memory, and place-making approaches to consider the career of a complicated historical figure, Estelle Reel. She is co-editor of Storied Practices: Positionality in Writing Studies (forthcoming 2026, CSU Press/WAC Clearinghouse) and co-author of a book exploring story as a pan-human method of knowledge making. Her research interests revolve around rhetoric, narrative/story, public memory, qualitative research methodologies, ethics, and public humanities

 

Education

Ph.D. in Technical Communication & Rhetoric, Texas Tech University     

M.A. in English, Texas A&M University 

B.A. in English and Psychology, Texas A&M University 

 

Recent and Upcoming Courses

Storytelling as Rhetorical Theory, Method, and Product

Rhetorics of Public Memory

Rhetorics and Civil Discourse

Qualitative Research Methods

Culture, Communication, and the Workplace

College Composition and Rhetoric

 

Selected Publications/Awards

• Small, N. (2025). Braided art: rhetorical craft. Writers: Craft and Context, vol. 6, no. 1,  34-50.
• Small, N. & Stone, E. (Eds.) (2024). Positionality stories. Medium.com Blog Collection.
• Small, N. (2022). Reading for the weaver: Amplifying agency through a material rhetoric methodology. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 27(1).
• Small, N. (2022). A rhetoric of becoming: USAmerican women in Qatar. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms, Parlor Press. 
• Small. N. & Longo, B. (Eds.). (2022). Transnational research in technical communication: Stories, realities, and reflections. Studies in Technical Communication, SUNY Press. 
• Patton, T. & Small, N. (2020). Making waves: Maxine Waters and her challenge to black women’s erasure and white hegemony. In B.K. Alexander, M. N. Goins, & J. F. McAlister (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Communication (pp. 243-258). Routledge.
• Presidential Distinguished Scholar (2025-2028)
• College of Graduate Studies Mid-Career Mentor Award (2025)
• College of Arts & Sciences Extraordinary Merit in Research Award (2024)
• Wyoming Historical Society's Lola Homsher Research Grant (2023)

Full Curriculum Vita.