Ashleigh McDonald

Professional Bio

Ashleigh McDonald is a first year Ph.D. student on the Communication Arts side of the program. Her work is often at the broad intersections of rhetoric, ideology, narrative, and memory. She enjoys rhetorical theory and criticism. Recently she has been exploring how narratives around dark and often unanalyzed places such as cemeteries and haunted places operate epideictically, telling us what to praise and fear. Her master’s thesis examined how ghost hunting shows rhetorically create and continue an abandoned mental health institution that is considered haunted as well as questioning how those ghosts operate rhetorically and what they may be trying to tell us. When she isn’t rhetorically hunting down things that go bump in the night, she enjoys media criticism and classical rhetorics.