Sarah Walden, Ph.D.

Dr. Sarah Walden is currently an Associate Professor of Rhetorical Theory and Criticism and Program Director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. She was hired as an Assistant Professor in 2013 and received tenure in Spring 2019. She served for two years as Associate Director of the BIC (2023-2025) before being appointed Director of the University Scholars Program (2025-2026). She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Mississippi.

Dr. Walden's faculty line requires a teaching load of 2:2. She teaches and Co-Coordinates the BIC's World of Rhetoric sequence (BIC 1313 and 1323) each Fall and Spring. She also teaches Examined Life I (BIC 1112) each Fall and has coordinated that class for the last two years. Since beginning administrative work in 2023, she has been teaching a 2:1, but prior to that, she taught a BIC 4389: Capstone—Life at the Intersections (with Mike Whitenton, a former Lecturer in the BIC), and before that, BIC 2344: World Cultures IV—The United States in the World. She also served as Co-Chair for Baylor University’s QEP Development Committee (with Dr. Kevin Villegas, Dean on Intercultural Engagement, Student Life), a large committee that spans all academic units and many staff units. The topic is Civil Discourse.

Dr. Walden's research focuses on women’s rhetoric and popular culture. She began her career studying 19th and early 20th-century cookbooks and domestic rhetoric, and her book, Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1796-1940, was published with the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019. In the years that followed, she chose to move into contemporary rhetorics and new media and spent some time learning qualitative research methods in order to study social media. She currently has two areas of interest: maternal rhetoric on social media, such as Instagram and TikTok, and women’s rhetoric and literacy studies. She recently secured a book contract for an edited collection in the Fandom and Culture series with the University of Iowa Press. She is co-editing with Kacy Tillman, Director of the Honors program at the University of Tampa. The collection, Feral: Romantasy and Its Readers, is planned for release in Fall 2027.