Kristy Maddux

Kristy Maddux is a scholar of rhetoric and political culture who is interested in rhetorical practices of democratic citizenship, and especially how they are inflected by gender, race, religion, ability, and other identity markers.  She is invested in thinking about how ordinary citizens fuel democracy through habits such as deliberation, public advocacy, protest, listening, empathy, stranger sociability, and more, as well as the structures that encourage and inhibit those habits.

Her current projects investigate how the built environment facilitates such democratic habits of citizenship—how our streets, sidewalks, benches, lighting, parks, and more shape how citizens are able to interact with each other.  She is examining this question in three specific cases: the corpus of work by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fairgrounds in Chicago, and the 1960s freeway revolt in Washington, D.C.

Maddux’s most recent book, Practicing Citizenship: Women’s Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, considered how women articulated democratic practices of citizenship at a time when they had been officially declared citizens but most could not vote.  Looking at hundreds of speeches delivered over the six month course of a world’s fair, she shows women of all classes—activists, socialites, professionals, philanthropists—articulating four practices of citizenship, which she calls democratic deliberation, organized womanhood, economic participation, and racial uplift. 

Maddux’s early work, including her 2010 book The Faithful Citizen, concerned popular Christian media and historic religious figures such as William Jennings Bryan and Aimee Semple McPherson.  

She continues to teach and advise on all of these topics: feminist rhetorical history, deliberative theory, social movements, religious rhetoric, and contemporary media.  

Maddux Graduate Advising Philosophy