Office: Hellems 88
Lisa A. Flores is a professor in the Department of Communication. A rhetorical scholar, Professor Flores is guided by the argument that the vocabularies we speak and the stories we tell create the worlds we inhabit.
As Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, this principle shapes her commitment to inclusive excellence as it reminds her daily that, while the impact of narratives of inequity are deep, they are not all-encompassing. The co-chair of the campus IDEA Council, Flores devotes much of her workday to implementing what she envisions as comprehensive campus change designed to bring about a more diverse, equitable and inclusive campus.
In her research, Flores studies narratives of privilege and disadvantage, particularly as they play out in public discourse around questions of race, gender, nation and labor. She is the author of Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (Penn State University Press, Fall 2020), as well as a number of essays appearing in journals, such as the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs and Critical Studies in Media Communication. Her current work examines mobility and containment as rhetorical mechanisms of race, gender and sexuality.
In her undergraduate teaching, Flores enjoys thinking with students about the connections between identity and communication as well as engaging in rhetorical methods. She also teaches graduate seminars in rhetoric and critical race/gender studies.