Consuelo C. Salas, Ph.D.
Pronouns: she/her
Assistant Professor
College of Arts and Letters
Rhetoric and Writing Studies
SDSU
Bio
Consuelo C Salas (Ph.D., University of Texas at El Paso) joined the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies (RWS) in 2020 and is currently an assistant professor. Prior to joining the RWS department, Salas taught writing in the Department of English and First Year Writing Program at UNC Charlotte. Her research draws from many different disciplines, but at its core, it is informed by cultural rhetorics, visual rhetoric, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
As a visual rhetorician and a food studies scholar, Salas focuses on the intersections of race, gender, food, and communication. One of her areas of interest includes commodification and representations of Mexican and Mexican Americans to U.S.-based audiences within “food spaces.” Salas is at work on a book that critically explores images associated with the cultural imaginary of Mexico and the images’ relationship to food and identity. Salas's co-edited collection Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think About Food, published with University of Arkansas Press, was awarded the Gourmand World Cookbook third best in the world in the category of Professionals in 2017. Her work can also be found in edited collections, such as Visual Imagery, Metadata, and Multimodal Literacies Across the Curriculum and Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, as well as in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Gastronomica, Food, Culture, & Society and the Community Literacy Journal.
Salas has also done work that explores the intersections of translanguaging and human-computer interaction and interaction design. “How the ideology of monolingualism drives us to monolingual interaction,” published in the May/June 2021 edition of the Community and Culture Forum within Interactions by the Association for Computing Machinery, examines the monolingual design of computing interfaces and advocates for a revision of monolingual designs to account for multilingual computer interactions. Interactions is a leading trade magazine in the fields of human-computer interaction and interaction design. Salas and her collaborators also have a forthcoming book chapter, “Negotiating digitally-mediated environments: Exploring how bilingual and multilingual users interact with monolingual interfaces” in Learning Machines: Sociology of Language Perspectives on Digitally Mediated Learning, accepted with de Gruyter Mouton.
Salas was also a Co-PI of a Humanities Initiatives at Hispanic-Serving Institutions grant with the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Creating Expansive Approaches to the Teaching (CEAT) of Writing in a Southern California Border Region.” CEAT was a three-year initiative that brought together diverse faculty dedicated to expanding the rhetorical tradition to imagine a first-year and upper-division writing course curriculum that pushed beyond the traditional methods of teaching writing. Salas and her colleagues are at work on an article that explores the work of changing curriculum within a discipline.
Outside of her academic work, Salas likes to crochet and knit, take short walks along the coast and at different parks with her husband and senior pup Slurpee, and add to her collection of national park stamps for her National Parks Passport book.