First-Year Writing Pedagogy, Writing Program Administration, Rhetorical Genre Studies, Rhetorical Listening and Rhetorical Empathy, Resilience Theory, Trauma Theory and Trauma-informed Pedagogy, Intersectionality, Rhetorics of Health and Medicine
Dr. Emily Rónay Johnston (she/her) has been teaching in higher education since 2004. Her research and teaching center on writing as a reflective practice that cultivates resilience.
Currently, she is supported by a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2024–2026), through which she is pursuing training in psychology and neuroscience to develop an interdisciplinary theory of resilience in writing studies. Her book-in-progress, Writing is Resilience: Fostering Agency and Transformation in First-Year Composition, argues that writing can cultivate resilience by helping students develop agency in the face of challenge.
Her work is forthcoming in Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Writers: Craft & Context, Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, and several edited collections.
She has taught courses in composition, rhetoric, composition pedagogy, English for multilingual writers, creative writing, ethnic studies, film, and gender and sexuality studies, and has served on numerous curricular, assessment, and equity-focused committees across the UC system.
Dr. Johnston holds a Ph.D. in English Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from Illinois State University, an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of California, Davis.
