Dr. Alexis McGee received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at San Antonio where she also received two certificates of concentration in Linguistics and Rhetoric and Composition.

Drawing from this background, McGee is an interdisciplinary scholar who engages with various fields and sub-disciplines such as Rhetoric, Composition/Writing Studies, Black Studies, Critical Pedagogies, Sound Studies, as well as Women and Gender Studies. Her concentrated research interests, more specifically, focus on Black women’s rhetorical uses of voice, literacies, and expression.

McGee’s forthcoming book, From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics,  (SUNY 2024), amplifies Black women’s ongoing public assertions of resistance, agency, and hope across different media from the nineteenth century to today. By examining recordings, music videos, autobiographical writings, and speeches, Alexis McGee explores how figures such as Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Queen Latifah, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Janelle Monáe, and more mobilize sound to challenge antiBlack discourses and extend social justice pedagogies. Building on contemporary Black feminist interventions in sound studies and sonic rhetorics, From Blues to Beyoncé reveals how Black women’s sonic acts transmit meaning and knowledge within, between, and across generations.

Her work has been featured on BBC Radio4 and published in various venues including College, Composition, and Communication (forthcoming, 2022); constellations (2021); Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2021); Rhetoric Review (2021); Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2018); Obsidian (2017); and Pedagogy (2016). Some of her other works can be found in What Is “College-Level” Writing? 2.0. (forthcoming); NCTE/CCCC: Teaching, Organizing, and Learning in the Contemporary Freedom Struggle (forthcoming); Sensory Rhetorics: (Re)Making Sense in Perilous Times (forthcoming); Beyoncé, Black Feminism, and Spirituality: The Lemonade Reader, (2019); The Lauryn Hill Reader (2018); Racial Shorthand: Coded Discrimination Contested in Social Media (2018); St. James Encyclopedia of Hip Hop (2018); and Critical Survey of American Literature (2016).

She currently teaches WRDS 150A and WRDS 350 (including a special section of 350 designed for interdisciplinary students). Dr. McGee has also created a new WRDS 450 course that focuses on writing for public audiences and publications; this course is expected to be offered at UBC for the first time during Winter 1 2024. She has also taught undergraduate courses in Professional and Technical Writing; Introduction to Women and Gender Studies; and Advanced Composition as well as graduate courses in History of Rhetoric; AntiRacist Critical Composition; Research Methods; and Black Essay Writing elsewhere.

McGee, Alexis. “Beyisms: The Southern Sociolinguistic Strategies and Rhetorics in Beyoncé’s Lemonade.” Beyoncé, Black Feminism, and Spirituality: The Lemonade Reader, edited by Kinitra Brooks and Kameelah Martin, Routledge, 2019.

McGee, Alexis and J. David Cisneros. “Looking Forward, Looking Back: A Dialogue on ‘The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism.’” Special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, vol 15, iss. 4, 2018.

 This course investigates the importance of voice as it is composed through a variety of forms. What does it mean to read voice within texts? How do we listen to voices? How can we craft voice when we write? In addition to seeking answers to these questions, this course builds working definitions for the features defining voice, loosely, by engaging with scholarly conversations across discourses (sociolinguistics, writing studies, postcolonialism, etc.). By the end of this course, students should be able to identify, develop, and understand of how voice can be used rhetorically.