Wendy S. Hesford is a professor of English and an Ohio Eminent Scholar of Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy. Since 2018, Hesford has served as faculty director of the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme. She has affiliate appointments in women’s, gender and sexuality studies and comparative studies. She is interested in the transformative role that critical human rights literacy plays in exposing the violence of representation, revealing hidden, repressed and silenced stories.

Please list your educational history including degrees earned and universities attended. 

• New York University, MA, PhD
• Montclair State University, BA

Please describe your current research/creative activity or area(s) of interest. 

I’ve long been interested in issues related to identity, subjectivity, human rights, and the politics of cultural and legal recognition, especially as these configurations shape the lives of vulnerable communities.  For example, my second monograph Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2011) considered the rhetorical functions of “truth-telling discourses” (auto/biography, testimonials, documentary evidence, photography) within contemporary human rights campaigns, with particular attention to the visual culture of human rights. The last chapter of that book, “Spectacular Childhoods: Sentimentality and the Politics of (In)visibility,” paved the way for my most recent monograph Violent Exceptions: Children’s Human Rights and Humanitarian Rhetorics (Ohio State University Press, 2021), which is available in an open access edition. Violent Exceptions considers how the development of international human rights networks, treaties and conventions, including the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, has made children’s human rights more visible. While the UNCRC shifted the focus from children as human rights victims to children as rights holders, humanitarian orientations have dominated public representations and perceptions of children’s rights. Violent Exceptions considers the ethical and political stakes in circulating images of endangered children in our media-saturated global market and argues that the prioritization of humanitarian orientations to violations of children’s human rights fail to deliver political solutions and systemic remedies. 

What/who influenced you to select your area(s) of study and how has that impacted your career? 

I started my graduate work at New York University in the area of Modernist Poetry, but after the first year of teaching writing and taking courses in critical pedagogy, qualitative methods and rhetoric and discourse analysis, I shifted my emphasis to focus on the culture and politics of education. There was a professor in the Cultural Foundations program at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development that greatly influenced the direction of my teaching and research. Her name was Professor Berenice Fisher and she taught courses in educational philosophy, materialist theory and feminist pedagogy. My first book, Framing Identities: Autobiography and the Politics of Pedagogy (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), was heavily influenced by my coursework with Professor Fisher. Framing Identities is an auto-ethnographic study of how power, authority and identity are negotiated through autobiographical acts at Oberlin College, where I held my first full-time academic position as a visiting assistant professor. 

What undergraduate classes do you teach? 

Over the course of my career, I have taught a range of undergraduate courses, including introductory writing courses and upper-level courses in the International Studies Program, such as Children and War, and Introduction to Human Rights, and upper-level courses in English, such as Rhetoric of Social Movements, Law and Literature, Women in Literature and Culture, and English Studies and Global Human Rights. Professor Amy Shuman and I developed the latter course as part of our work on the development of the interdisciplinary human rights minor within Ohio State’s International Studies Program. 

Why do you think a student should take these classes and why would they be of interest to students majoring in other disciplines?

The undergraduate courses that I teach on social movements and human rights appeal to English majors and minors, pre-law students, as well as students in International Studies, with minors in Human Rights, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Human rights are often considered the province of political scientists, legal scholars and policy makers. In practice, however, the obstacles facing human rights are just as often a problem understood by the humanities. My courses provide students an opportunity to engage in the study of the convergence of cultural and legal configurations of human rights.  

What aspects of your teaching give you the most satisfaction?

The upper-level courses in law and literature and introductory and advanced courses in human rights give me the most satisfaction, especially when students realize the vital role of rhetoric and discourse analysis in understanding complex cultural and political issues. 

How can students who are interested in research or creative activity in these areas reach out to you?

Students can reach out to me via email or stop by the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT) offices in Hagerty Hall. GAHDT is a university-wide program dedicated to building capacity at the university for cross-disciplinary collaborations that foreground artistic and humanistic orientations in addressing complex local and global challenges. 

I’ve been the director of GAHDT since 2018 and have worked on the development of several programs that offer specific opportunities for undergraduates who employ artistic and humanistic methods and practices in approaching their research. Among the most popular of these programs in our Society of Fellows program, which supports Ohio State faculty, graduate student and undergraduate student research. 

What book/movie would you recommend or what music do you enjoy?  

Currently, the top musicians on my Spotify workout list are Black Pumas, Sam Fender, Hozier and Rina Sawayama. 

What is the most interesting place you have visited? 

I’ve traveled to China several times over the past twenty years and visited tourist attractions such as the Great Wall of China, Forbidden City and Li River. While these sites were interesting and enlightening, traveling with my two adopted daughters to the provinces in which they were born, visiting the social welfare institutes where they lived for the first year of their lives, and meeting those who cared for them have been among the most profound experiences of my life. These experiences expanded my understanding of their unique cultural heritage, regional customs and transnational identities. 

What is the best advice you have received? 

The best advice that I have received was from a senior colleague at Oberlin College at the beginning of my career. This colleague urged me to remember that all research is provisional. She encouraged me to not only articulate the exigences that shape research but to acknowledge its temporality. Her advice helped me approach research as a process. 

What advice would you give to undergraduate students? 

To seek out interdisciplinary perspectives on the issues and topics that you care about. 

To recognize the value of the arts and humanities in developing ethical orientations to critical socio-political issues and in broadening cross-cultural understandings.  

Feel free to stop by my office hours. 

I love to talk about cultural approaches to human rights and the transformative power of the arts and humanities to drive social change. 

Would you like to share a fun/interesting fact about yourself? 

I just learned to paddleboard. 

Learn more about Professor Hesford’s work, email and office location on her department page. Learn more about Global Arts and Humanities.