Karrieann Soto Vega

On teaching leave, Fall 2024.

Karrieann Soto Vega is a DiaspoRican feminista and cultural rhetorician. Her research and teaching spans Puerto Rican and Latinx studies, anticolonial feminism, activism and social movements, performance, and sonic rhetoric. She has received a fellowship from CENTRO: Center for Puerto Rican Studies research project, Rooted + Relational, focusing on the theme of  “Archives, Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico.” Her collaborative efforts also garnered a “Right to the Discipline” grant from the Antipode Foundation.

Soto Vega’s book manuscript, tentatively titled Rhetorics of Defiance: Lolita Lebrón’s Anticolonial Action, Representation, and Reverberation is under advanced contract with the Intersectional Rhetorics book series of The Ohio State University Press. Based on her dissertation research, which won the Association for the History of Rhetoric’s Dissertation Award in 2018, Rhetorics of Defiance is a feminist rhetorical history of Lolita Lebrón—a twentieth century Puerto Rican nationalist, her anti-imperial prison writing, and her relentless coalitional activism, as it reverberates into contemporary struggles.

Some of her other work can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture; the Journal for the History of Rhetoric; and CENTRO: Journal for the Center of Puerto Rican Studies.