Sarah Kugler

Sarah Kugler (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kansas. She holds an MA in Rhetoric and Composition from KU, and bachelor’s degrees in Art and Philosophy from Northwestern College (IA). Kugler’s research interests include writing center theory and pedagogy, sociolinguistics, English Language Studies, and Critical Discourse Analysis.

Kugler is the 2023 recipient of the International Writing Centers Association Dissertation Grant for her dissertation, titled: Audience, Power, Identity, and Language Ideologies in Graduate Writing Consultations. Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary project which uses consultation audio and video-recordings, interviews, and surveys to ask: a) how graduate writers and consultants talk about instructors and other powerful audiences during writing center consultations, and b) how graduate students’ identities impact their understanding of and talk about those powerful audiences. The project employs Critical Discourse Analysis as its methodology and draws on research methods and theories of identity from sociolinguistics.

She has presented at a variety of conferences, including IWCA and CCCC. Her most recent project, titled “Race and White Linguistic Hegemony in The Writing Center Journal,” is a corpus-based analysis of the use of the word race in The Writing Center Journal articles from 2002 – 2022 and was presented at CCCC 2023.

Kugler also works at the KU Writing Center and has developed and facilitated programming for internal consultant training, writing fellows programs, and graduate writing groups.