The Kellie Rayburn Outstanding Thesis Award
The Rayburn Award is presented annually to the writer of the year's outstanding thesis. The award honors the memory of Kellie Rayburn, an alumna of the M.A. program and a long-time lecturer in the English department until her death in 2001. Since 2004, Honorable Mention awards are also presented. Starting in 2021, the award is given out based on the year of submission rather than the academic year of submission. Thesis and Alternative thesis writers are nominated by their faculty readers, and award winners are selected by a sub-committee of the Graduate Committee.
- 2022 Emily McKellar co-winner "SHOPPING FOR A CAUSE: SOCIAL INFLUENCERS, PERFORMATIVE ALLYSHIP, AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF ACTIVISM"
- 2022 Robert Sorrells co-winner "Over-Looking Disclosure: Disability and the Writing Center"
- 2021 Randy Lucio "Critical Period Controversies for Second Language Acquisition: Implications for Language Teaching"
- 2021 Honorable Mention, Elena Silva "Chicano English at the Dinner Table"
- 2020 Katie Chavez 'Illustrating Sherlock Holmes: Adapting the Great Detective in Granada Television’s Sherlock Holmes'
- 2020 Honorable Mention, Edward Ferrari 'Nystagmic Poetics in Lorine Niedecker’s Postwar Poetry'
- 2019 Ariel Zepeda 'Cultivating Uncertainty Through a Multimodal Perspective on Process to Encourage Transfer'
- 2019 Megan Davis Kinnally 'A R(EVOLUTION) OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: YOUNG-ADULT DYSTOPIAN FICTION AS A VEHICLE FOR ECOCRITICAL AWARENESS'
- 2019 Honorable Mention, Tabitha Rose-Ann Zarate 'UTILIZING VISUAL RHETORIC: A NEW APPROACH TO COMICS, SUPERHEROES, AND RED SUNS'
- 2018 Ambar Perez 'LANGUAGE CULTURE WARS: EFFECTS OF LANGUAGE POLICY ON LANGUAGE MINORITIES AND ENGLISH LEARNERS'
- 2017 D'Angelo Bridges 'Revising Rhetorical Theory in "My Bondage and My Freedom": Narrativizing and Theorizing a Rhetoric of Blackness'
- 2017 Chere Smith 'The Narrative Performances of Teenage Girls: Participation, Identity, and Authority as the Foundation for Power'
- 2016 Guadalupe Rincon 'GATEKEEPERS TO THE THIRD SPACE: AUTHORITY, AGENCY, AND LANGUAGE HIERARCHY IN FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION'
- 2015 Pamela M. Portenstein 'BREAKING BREAD, SHAPING UNDERSTANDING: THE ECO-FOOD COMMUNITY AS COGNITIVE SYSTEM'
- 2014 Ryan Goble 'Narrative Accounts of Third-Generation Mexican-Americans: Bilingualism in a Third Space'
- 2013 Leslie Hutchinson '[Un]Reifying Anonymous: Hacking the Public Identity'
- 2011 Jason Wayne Loan 'The (Re)Invention of Feedback'
- 2010 Amanda Jill Taylor 'Welcome to the World of Tomorrow Today: Matt Groening's Futurama as Posthuman Mediator'
- 2009 James Ireland Ducat 'Is There a Male Victim?: Discursive Subjection in Representations ofFemale-on-Male Childhood Sexual Abuse'
- 2008 Fiona Harris-Ramsby 'The Habermas/Foucault Debate: Implications for Rhetoric and Composition'
- 2007 Amy Clark 'Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl Novels: Contemporary Subversive Tales'
- 2007 Honorable Mention, Angela Asbell 'Cultivating Dissent: Queer Zines and the Active Subject'
- 2007 Honorable Mention, Brian Bailie 'EverQuest, Reality, and Postmodern Theories of Community'
- 2006 Davina Padgett Warden 'Irony, Rhetoric, and the Portrayal Of 'No Place': Construing the Elaborate Discourse Of Thomas More's Utopia'
- 2006 Honorable Mention, Judy Holliday 'Evolving Outcomes of the WPA Outcomes Statement'
- 2005 John Garcia 'The Uses of Sight in Nature Writing'
- 2005 Honorable Mention, Richard Sabolick 'The Split Dark Rider: An Examination of Labor Conflict and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men'
- 2004 James Smart 'Rhetorical And Narrative Structures In Hersey's Hiroshima: How They Breathe Life Into The Tale Of A Doomed City'
- 2004 Honorable Mention, Rebecca Marsh 'Refiguring Milton in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own'
- 2003 Steven Estus 'Home and Who: A Rhetorical Analysis of Rudyard Kipling's 'Tiger! tiger!' and 'Letting in the Jungle''
- 2002 Omar Moran 'The Representations of Masculinities in the Works of Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather'
- 2001 Miguel Reed 'Men's Gossip'