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Zarah Moeggenberg

She/Her

  • Assistant Professor

Credentials

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Rhetoric and Composition
    Washington State University
  • Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing
    Northern Michigan University

Recent and upcoming courses

Fall 2024

Spring 2025

Biography

Zarah C. Moeggenberg joined Metro State in 2021. She brings a focus on social justice in technical communication to the Technical Communication and Interaction Design program. She teaches courses in editing, document design, content strategy, and medical writing. Her courses immerse students in considering positionality, privilege, and power—how these relate to issues of equity and justice within technical communication.

Moeggenberg's current scholarship focuses on tracing rhetorics of the body and embodiment within technical communication; graduate student mentoring for the job market; digital literacies; and social justice-based pedagogy. Her scholarship is concerned with queer and feminist rhetorical practices in technical communication, particularly in medical writing. Her most recent projects focus on embodiment in government-sponsored sexual education materials. She is also writing about strategies to develop medical writing curriculum within the field of technical and professional communication.

Moeggenberg holds a PhD from Washington State University and an MFA from Northern Michigan University. She has presented at national and international conferences and has numerous publications.

Research Focus

  • Social Justice
  • Rhetorics of Health and Medicine
  • Medical Writing
  • Queer and Feminist Rhetorics

Forthcoming Publications

  • Moeggenberg, Z., Edenfield, A. C., & Holmes, S. (2022). “Trans Oppression through Technical Rhetorics: A Queer Phenomenological Analysis of Institutional Documents.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication.

  • Moeggenberg, Z. (2022). “Graduate Student Mentoring in Technical Communication and Rhetoric and Composition Programs. Rhetoric Review.

Publications

  • Flores, W., Craig, C. & Moeggenberg, Z. (2022). "Introduction to the Special Issue: Working Toward a Definition of Queer Literacies." Literacy in Composition Studies Journal, vol. 9, no. 2.

  • Moeggenberg, Z. & Walton, R. (2019). “How Queer Theory Can Inform Design Thinking Pedagogy." In Proceedings of the 37th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication (SIGDOC '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 4, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3328020.3353924

  • Moeggenberg, Z. (2019). “Bodying, A Queer Rhetoric.” Pre/Text. 24(1-4), pp. 99-118. Ed. J. Rhodes.

  • Moeggenberg, Z. & Solomon, S. (2018). “Power, Consent, and The Body: #MeToo and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies. 70, pp. 4-25

  • Moeggenberg, Z. “Keeping Safe (and Queer).” (2018). The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing & Rhetoric. Eds. Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander.

  • Moeggenberg, Z. (2017). “A Queer Challenge to Repronormativity in the Digital Classroom.” Getting Personal: Teaching Personal Writing in the Digital Age. Ed. Laura Gray-Rosendale, SUNY Press.

  • Villanueva, V. & Moeggenberg, Z. (2017). “A Tale of Two Generations: How We’re Taught; What We Learned (Or Not).” Journal of Basic Writing.

Awards and Honors

  • 2018 Gloria Anzaldúa Rhetorician Award