Alicen (Ali) Rushevics

Alicen (Ali) Rushevics is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. She specializes in rhetoric, discourses of reparation and apology, U.S. imperialism in the Pacific, and global Indigenous human rights. Overarching themes in her research include rhetorics of trauma, wounding, and grief, and how they affect the mobility and formation of individual and national bodies; questions of identity in mediations between nation, culture, and individual; and relationships among history, memory, and storytelling, particularly in how they complicate past and ongoing experiences of state violence.

Ali’s dissertation, “Constructing a Pacific Nation: Critical Interrogations of U.S. Imperialism in Apology and Reparation Legislation," was recognized in 2024 by the Public Address Division of the National Communication Association with the Benson-Campbell Dissertation Research Proposal Award. Her teaching was recognized in 2024 with the Advanced Achievement in Teaching Award from the College of Letters & Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Ali earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A. in Philosophy from Gonzaga University, and B.A. in Communication Studies and Philosophy from Gonzaga University. 

Areas of Expertise: Rhetorical Theory and Criticism; Public Address; Settler Colonialism; Indigenous Studies; Rhetorical Historiography; Apology and Reparation; U.S. Imperialism; Feminist Philosophy