Laurie Gries

Areas of Interest: Visual and Digital Rhetorics, Circulation Studies, New Materialisms, Research Methodologies, Digital Humanities

Laurie Gries (PhD, Syracuse University) is an associate professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) and Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. In relation to visual rhetoric, Laurie studies how images circulate, transform, and contribute to collective life and has developed a digital research method called iconographic tracking to help do this research. Her latest research using this method is a public humanities project called The Swastika Counter Project that aims to educate the general public about the targets, circulation, and intensity of antisemitic signs on the streets of the United States. 

Laurie is author of Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (2015), winner of the 2016 Advancement of Knowledge Award and the 2016 Research Impact Award from Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). She is author of numerous scholarly articles and lead editor of Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric (2018) as well as the digital book collection Doing Digital Visual Studies: One Image, Multiple Methodologies (2022). 

Laurie is also invested in developing research methods for new materialist rhetorical studies and is currently working on a new book project called Waking Up: Rhetorical Impressions from the Field that attempts to account for the rhetoricity that emerges between self and others in environmentally stressed and threatened landscapes. You can gain a sense of this new work in her 2020 College English article titled “New Materialist Ontobiography: A Critical-creative Approach for Coping and Caring in the Chuthulucene.” 

For more information about other current research projects, please see the Research Projects Page on this website.