Dr. Mara Lee Grayson’s work focuses on race rhetorics and racial equity in higher education. She is particularly interested in how white supremacy in higher education perpetuates racial trauma, both individually and collectively, and how individualistic rhetorics of trauma and mental illness perpetuate white supremacy. Her recent work analyzes the trigger warning, a pedagogical practice often framed as student-responsive and trauma-informed, to elucidate the ways in which trauma-informed pedagogy functions rhetorically to pathologize and individualize experiences of racism and other societal inequities that cause collective trauma. She is the author of the books Teaching Racial Literacy: Reflective Practices for Critical Writing (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and Race Talk in the Age of the Trigger Warning: Recognizing and Challenging Classroom Cultures of Silence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). Her scholarship, fiction, and poetry have also appeared in English Education, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, English Journal, St. John’s University Humanities Review, Fiction, Mobius: The Journal for Social Change, and The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, among other publications.

Twitter @maraleegrayson