After teaching in UT Austin’s Department of Rhetoric and Writing since 1997, Professor Davida Charney retired in fall 2023. She continues to provide professional training through the Human Dimensions of Organizations.
To understand readers’ wants and needs, she combined rhetoric and composition with linguistics and cognitive psychology. She taught technical and business writing, argumentation, and courses on the processes of reading and writing and the rhetoric of science at Penn State for 11 years. Her 1997 move to Texas was her first experience of living west of the Mississippi or south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Since 2011, she turned toward work in Jewish studies, applying contemporary rhetorical theory to the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Psalms and Jewish liturgy. This work has appeared in biblical studies journals and in a 2015 book, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms.
She spent spring 2017 visiting the Bible Studies department at Tel Aviv University supported by a Fulbright Fellowship.
Ultimately, she translates her work back to classroom lessons. “I enjoy helping students figure out how they can use writing to make the world a better place.”