Nora E. Webb
UNC Greensboro English PhD Student & Graduate Teaching Associate
Hi, I’m Nora E. Webb—a PhD student in English at UNC Greensboro, where I study feminist rhetoric, Pre-1900 American Literature, and the figure of the witch. My work explores how language and power shape identity, both on and off the page. Here, you’ll find my CV, current projects, and ways to get in touch.
Research Focus
I study how language shapes cultural ideas about gender, power, and the body, especially in pre-1900 American literature and modern popular culture. I’m drawn to figures like the witch and the unruly woman, and I’m interested in how they’re used to police or challenge social norms. My work brings together feminist rhetorical theory, literary analysis, and media studies to explore how the same patterns keep showing up, but just in different costumes.
Current Projects
Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW)
I’m writing about how Megan Giddings’ novel The Women Could Fly uses the figure of the witch to explore both power and oppression. The novel frames bodily autonomy—especially resisting norms around marriage and reproduction—as a threat, using witchcraft to reveal how women’s lives are shaped by surveillance and state violence.
Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)
This work considers how writing centers can support student reflection and rhetorical growth in the age of generative AI. My project develops training and resources for peer consultants, helping them guide students in thinking critically about AI’s role in their writing, their purposes and audiences, and how to maintain an authentic voice. The goal is to reframe AI not as a problem to solve, but as an opportunity for rhetorical reflection and conversation..
Rhetoric Society of America National Conference (RSA)
I analyze how beauty culture frames dignity and virtue through aesthetic restraint and the performance of effortlessness. Focusing on the “clean girl” aesthetic, I trace how rhetorics of minimalism and wellness translate privilege into moral value and recast proximity to whiteness as natural. Its olfactory cues—light, sweet, consumable notes like vanilla—signal safety and compliance, contrasting with the spice and resin coded as unruly or excessive.
Rhetoric Society of America National Conference (RSA)
I examine tarot as a reflective practice that resists the indignity of having meaning or identity imposed from outside, reframing interpretation as a collaborative and embodied process. Drawing on feminist rhetorical theory, I analyze how shuffling, arranging, and narrating cards enact reflection as a multimodal rhetorical practice—visual, tactile, and narrative—that invites both insight and discomfort. Through this lens, tarot becomes a way to reclaim narrative authority and imagine futures on one’s own terms.