teigha mae vanhester
about.
Teigha Mae VanHester (she/her) is a disruptive intellectual and unapologetic scholar currently a PhD Candidate (ABD) in English Studies and a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Graduate Certificate at Illinois State University. She has lived in over 10 countries and currently serves as an Affiliated Faculty at Bradley University in the Women's and Gender Studies Department. As a writer, she writes in a unique, diverse format; demanding the academy allow students (like herself) have the right to their own language. As a native of South Central Los Angeles, California, speaker of Mandarin Chinese and multi-racial woman; she writes to have her community of nuanced individuals seen. Teigha has presented at CCCC, the Watson Conference, Computers and Writing, Conference for Community Writing and Cultural Rhetorics. She has received the ORWAC Research Grant, Scholars for the Dream Award, was the first Forum Editorial Fellow, an Emerging Scholar for the Coalition for Community Writing and a peer reviewer from Emerging Voices in Education (EViE) journal. Her work has been featured in Race and Yoga; Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture; and Women's Studies Quarterly Her writing focuses on providing a rhetorical framework for a key millennial demographic that decolonizes and reclaims the intellectual ancestry for an antiracist academic experience for students and scholars. As a writer, Teigha is looking to critique, connect, and create the rhetorical components/strategies used to perform epistemic inclusion, and acceptance within the academy and other capitalist institutions.
