Sarah Ann Singer, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Central Florida

Sarah Singer, a white woman with brown hair and glasses, looks directly at the camera. She is wearing glasses and a bright orange jacket. She is standing outside and in the center of two rows of columns, which are gently blurred.

Hello! I am an Assistant Professor of English and core faculty member in the Texts and Technology Ph.D. program at University of Central Florida. I earned my B.A. from University of Maryland, College Park and my Ph.D. from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Broadly, my research examines how our understanding of chronic illness is shaped by the information age. What does it mean to engage with health and medical information online and how can we prepare students to read and write across multimedia contexts? Primarily, I pursue research that examines the persuasive dimensions of popular and technical health discourses. My work combines rhetorical and qualitative research methods to investigate chronic conditions such as Lyme Disease, diabetes, and long covid, conditions in which engaging productively with information is crucial. Some of my recent research in this area is published in Technical Communication Quarterly and an edited collection, The Rhetoric of Health and Medicine As/Is: Theories and Concepts for an Emerging Field (OSU Press, 2020).

My book project, The Patient Empowerment Paradox: Lyme Disease Rhetoric and Contested Health Literacies, examines a range of public and professional genres to consider how patients are persuaded to conduct research, share their health information, and seek expert medical care with the hope of curing Chronic Lyme. To better understand the contradictory claims emerging from social media platforms, healthcare providers’ clinical websites, government organizations, and peer-reviewed medical journal articles, I conduct rhetorical analyses of these sources as well as qualitative interviews with patients. Selections from this project appear in College English and Peitho.

My interest in health and medical communication extends into pedagogical research, as evidenced in my ongoing work on STEM writing, undergraduate research, and genre-based transfer across academic disciplines. This work appears or will appear in Composition Forum, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. Additionally, I am currently leading a project team that is redesigning our technical communication foundations course, ENC 3241: Writing for the Technical Professional. We aim to integrate a social justice focus and make the course more accessible for different types of learners, particularly those who are taking the course asynchronously online.

To learn more about my work, please see the following sources or send me an email (sarah.singer@ucf.edu):

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