Supervisor, Ph.D.

• Kirk Sullivan's dissertation, "A Rhetorical Targeting Framework: Informing the military use of Artificial Intelligence" (Working title). 
• Kavi Duvvoori's dissertation, "Situating synthetic rhetoric: Figures, speakers, and patches in algorithmically mediated language" (Working title)
• Diana Moreno Ojeda's dissertation, "Artificial Intelligence in science fiction: Nuanced affect states in the interpretation of human-nonhuman interactions" (Working title) Co-supervision with Victoria Lamont.
• Devon Moriarty's dissertation, "Upvoting democracy: The rhetoric of reddit, and the political power of participatory citizenship in networked social voting communities" (Working title) Co-supervision with Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher) 
• Kem-Laurin Lubin's 2025 dissertation, "Ethotic Heuristics in Artificial Intelligence:  A Rhetorical Framework for Guiding Responsible Data Design Praxis in Healthcare and Surveillance."   Co-supervision with Lai-Tze Fan.
• Kyle Gerber's 2025 dissertation, "Figuring forgiveness: Dramatistic aspects of forgiveness in an Anabaptist context." 
• Silya Benammar's 2024 dissertation (Co-director with Craig Hamilton), "The pragmatic effects of figurative language in social media"
• Monique Kampherm's 2023 dissertation, "Masks and caricatures: Prosopopoeia, ethopoeia, and the effect of social media on Canadian political leaders’ debates." Monique's dissertation won the Joan Pavelich CASDW 2023 Award for Best Dissertation, and was a finalist for UW's Governor General’s Gold Medal award. 
• Saeed Sabzian's 2017 dissertation, "The aural, eidetic, and narrative rhetoric of anxiety in The road and Fight club"
• Robert Clapperton´s 2014 dissertation, "Ametros: A technogenetic simulation game for professional communication coursework"
• Olga Gladkova´s 2011 dissertation, "The identification of epistemic topoi in a corpus of biomedical research articles"
• Michael Truscello´s 2006 dissertation, "The technical effect: Free and open software, and the programming of everyday life" Michael's dissertation was second in the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies & University Microfilms International Distinguished Dissertation Award for Social Sciences and the Humanities, 2006. 

Supervisor, M.A., Rhetoric and Communication Design

• Sophie Morgan's 2023 Major Project, "De-Coding literacy: An analysis of Ontario’s K-8 2020 mathematics curriculum." Co-supervision with Bri Wiens (Check out her Feminist Think Tank, with Shana Macdonald) 
• Maire Slater's 2023 Major Project, "Rhetorical figures in music."
• Katherine Tu´s 2019 Major Project, "Collocation in rhetorical figures: A case study in parison, epanaphora and homoioptoton"
• Cort Egan´s 2011 Major Project, "Just doing it through metonymy: Yachts, diamonds, fast cars and beautiful people"
• Ian Blechschmidt´s 2008 Major Project, "Comics, semiotics and ideology: Visual rhetoric in Captain America"
• Sarah Whyte´s 2000 Major Project, "The Pusztai affair"
• Frances Ranger´s 1999 Major Project, "Science, rhetoric, and Philip Rushton"
• Greg Cento´s 1994 Major Project, "Dueling discourses: A Bakhtinian look at the abuse of the language of ecology in twenty years of advertising in National Geographic magazine"

Supervisor, B.A. (Hons), Rhetoric and Professional Writing; Rhetoric, Media, and Professional Communication

• Douglas Guilbeault's 2013 Honours thesis, " The consubstantial nature of speech genres: Social identity and citizens band radio"
• Ashley Rose Kelly's 2008 Honours thesis, "The rhetorical construction of scientists as authors in popular science books: Ethos in Richard Dawkins' The selfish gene and Carl Sagan's The dragons of Eden"
• Saranya Yogarajah's 2007 Honours thesis, "Malcolm X: Ethos and capital"
• Charles McColm's 2005 Honours thesis, "Managing collaboration: How Microsoft closes technology and binds its customers"
• Monika Smetana's 2004 Honours thesis, "Selection and construction of health reality in health advertisements"
• Russell Wong's 2003 Honours thesis, "Rhythmic figuration and cognitive rhetoric"
• Rebecca Carruther's 2002 Honours thesis, "Speaking (for) others: Constructing communal authorization in the Niels Bohr quantum theory of the atom"
• Todd Sieling's 2000 Honours thesis, "A natural history of the -er agentive"
• Sonja Sen's 1999 (joint RPW-Environmental Studies) Honours thesis, "The language of eco-feminism"
• Martha Rudder's 1997 Honours thesis, "Xenonzine"

Reader, Ph.D.

• Andrew Deman's 2010 dissertation, "The comics other: Charting the correspondence between comics and difference"
• Mark Wallin's 2008 dissertation, "A eurhythmatic response to adaptive accrual: A rhetoric of adaptation"
• Teena Carnegie's 1998 dissertation, "The rhetoric of identification and substance in Canadian feminist criticism"

Reader, M.A., Rhetoric and Communication Design

• Sarah Casey's 2023 Thesis, "Alternative risks: How mainstream 'alt-right' rhetorics manifest in the sub-politics of Canadian risk discourse"
• Bruce Dadey's 2002 Major Project "A genealogy of AIDS: Newsweek's coverage of the epidemic, 1981-1995"
• Colin Mook's 1995 Major Project, "Computer-mediated communications studies: pedagogy and technical communication in text-based virtual realities"
• Susan Daniel-Simon's 1994 Major Project, "Helpful help: Designing and developing online help systems"
• Nan Tunnicliffe's 1992 Major Project "Improving the odds in the grantsmanship game: A case study in the procurement process between northern agencies and government industries"

Reader, M.A., Literature

• Michael O'Brien's 2009 Major Project "Culturally Resonant: Linton Kwesi Johnson Sounding Meaning in Protest"

Internal-External, Ph.D.

• Gaurav Sahu's 2024 doctoral dissertation in Computer Science, "Harnessing Generalist LLMs for Diverse Objective and Subjective NLP Tasks."
• Geovania Pimenta's 2016 doctoral dissertation in Management Science, "The Structuring of Ambiguous Stimuli in Human Communication"
• Cameron Shelley's 2005 doctoral dissertation in Philosophy, "Reasoning by multiple analogies"
• Glen R. Koehn's 1996 doctoral dissertation in Philosophy, "Fictional objects"
• Nirmalya N. Chakraborty's 1995 doctoral dissertation in Philosophy, "An inquiry into meaning (in light of W. V. O. Quine and D. Davidson)"

External Examiner, Ph.D.

• Tess Laidlaw's 2013 doctoral dissertation in Rhetoric and Media Studies, University of Saskatchewan, "The rhetoric of reportage: The media construction of a pandemic"

Reader, Ph.D. and Masters, Other disciplines

• Yetian Wang's 2025 doctoral dissertation, Computer Science, "A knowledge representation for, and an application to requirements elicitation of, rhetorical figures of perfect lexical repetition"
• Peyman Mohseni Kiasari's 2023 masters thesis (MMS), Management Science, "Towards measuring coherence in poem generation"
• Egill Ian Gudmundsson's 2022 masters thesis (MMath), Computer Science, "Controlled generation of stylized text using semantic and phonetic representations"
• Mohammed Alliheedi's 2019 doctoral dissertation, Computer Science, "Procedurally rhetorical verb-centric frame semantics as a knowledge representation for argumentation analysis of biochemistry articles"
• Danielle Fearon's 2017 masters thesis (MSc), Health Studies and Gerontology, School of Public Health and Health Systems,"The Association Between Early-life Written Language Skills and Late-life Cognitive Resilience."
• Mohammed Alliheedi's 2012 masters thesis (MMath), Computer Science, "Multi-document summarization system using rhetorical information"
• Claus W. Strommer's 2011 doctoral dissertation, Computer Science, "Pursuing the relations between saliency, context, intent, and rhetorical figures in text media"
• Jakub Gawryjolek's 2009 masters thesis (MMath), Computer Science, "Automated annotation and visualization of rhetorical figures"
• David Hirtle's's 2008 masters thesis (MMath), Computer Science, "Healthy co-reference: applying coreference resolution to the health education domain"
• Mathew Enns's 2006 masters thesis (MMath), Computer Science, "An investigation of word sense disambiguation for improving lexical chaining"
• Aaron Scriver's 2006 masters thesis (MMath), Computer Science, "Semantic distance in WordNet: A simplified and improved measure of semantic relatedness"