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Established in 1983, the Lillian Radford Chair at TCU is the oldest endowed chair in rhetoric and composition in the United States. Because TCU also has one of the earliest rhetoric and composition graduate programs, the Lillian Radford Research Associates (LRRA) represent graduate students with a keen interest in writing, literacies, composition, and rhetoric.  The current phase of the Lillian Radford Chairship focuses on: a strong commitment to undergraduate and graduate teaching, critical pursuits related to DEI, and curricular and research interest in connection with gender, sexuality, race, and ethnic studies.  Thus, current graduate students interested in the ways that pedagogy, literacies, and rhetoric intersect with critically raced theories, feminisms of color, queer/trans of color critiques, decolonization from the stance of Indigeneity, Black intellectual/radical traditions, Latinx studies and discourses, a radical abolitionist approach to educational inequalities, and/or fierce transdisciplinarity/anti-disciplinarity should consider becoming a Lillian Radford Research Associate (LRRA).  The projects that LRRAs pursue in this position include but are not limited to:
  • Assistantship on national digital projects (see http://blacklanguagesyllabus.com as an example)
  • Assistantship on national conferences (see http://hiphopliteraciesconference.weebly.com as an example; a joint project with the Brown Chair at the University of Arkansas for fall 2022 is currently in its planning stages)
  • Opportunities for co-authorship on projects related to the LRRA’s work and/or mentorship on publishing own single-authored pieces.
These projects are all meant to support LRRAs in establishing a visible footprint in fields related to rhetoric, composition, and literacies studies as well as in pursuing publication.  Students entering final years of funding will be given special consideration. Please see below to meet some of the past LRRAs and whose dissertations I have had the pleasure of advising!

Mary Toya Okonkwo
Toya Mary Okonkwo graduated in 2020 with a Ph.D. in English at Texas Christian university where she served as a Lillian Radford Research Associate, while also teaching Composition and Literature courses at TCU and the #nationbuilding Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas. Her dissertation was completely creative project, a play, that focuses on #blackgirlmagic in its many iterations, including elements of magical realism, Black girl storytelling, and a global triangulation of the Atlantic slave trade and its effects on Black girls in the contemporary era. Toya graduated summa cum laude with a double major B.A. in Theatre and Humanities and then her M.A. in English from Midwestern State University – a small liberal arts college that her great-great uncle literally helped build but was barred from attending because of segregation.  

Toya always includes her own personal perspective in all of her writing, drawing on her life experience and travels to understand the places where Black literature and language intersect with the rich and deep cultural traditions of Africa, while also having its own unique and potent distinction because of our legacy and ancestral connection to slavery. Her Master’s thesis was a creative collection of short stories on her grandmother’s life and legacy in the Black neighborhood, Stop Six, in Fort Worth, TX. She's written on Beyonce’s Lemonade as a neo-slave narrative and the influence of the Persian poet Tahirih on Western feminist studies. She's also presented papers on Kara Walker and Toni Morrison’s Five Poems, the Black Women’s Club Movement, Mary Prince and a new poetics, and at times her own creative works.

Teaching is where Toya's passion lies – being in the classroom, vibing with students, watching them excavate the gems of their own minds, while also helping me learn more along the way – whether it’s a Comp class or a literature class.  Toya values those precious moments of exposure and recognition where we realize the value of self-investigation of the truth.  For more on Toya and her research, click here and also please visit this website (click here) which is a research project that rejects the typical constraints of a seminar paper.
Cody Jackson is a community-accountable (Alexis Pauline Gumbs; Eric Darnell Pritchard) scholar-teacher whose work focuses on disability studies, queer studies, and the transformation of media technology. Cody’s research and pedagogy are focused on the interplay between queerness, disability, and archival praxis. Cody explores the material implications and influences of anti-ableist composition, theories of time and composing, and queer composition studies. He is currently working on a larger project that will contribute to ongoing conversations about the archival logics and archival spaces of the psych ward as a site of incarceration and detention. Cody is currently the Book Review editor for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and a co-chair of the Disability Studies Standing Group for the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Cody Jackson