Professor of English, Education, and Women's and Gender Studies,
dpg@umich.eduOffice Information:
3160 Angell Hall
hours: TR 4-5 pm and by appt.
Womens Literature; Technology and the Humanities; Language Studies; Graduate Faculty; English; Pedagogy; African American; Rhetoric and Composition
Education/Degree:
PhD, U of Texas at AustinHighlighted Work and Publications

Educating the New Southern Woman: Speech, Writing, and Race at the Public Women's Colleges, 1884-1945
David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs
From the end of Reconstruction through World War II, a network of public colleges for white women flourished throughout the South. Founded primarily as vocational colleges to educate women of modest economic means for life in the emerging “new” South, these schools soon transformed themselves into comprehensive liberal arts–industrial institutions, proving so popular that they became among the largest women’s colleges in the nation. In this illuminating volume, David Gold and Catherine L. Hobbs examine rhetorical education at all eight of these colleges, providing a...
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Rhetoric, History, and Women's Oratorical Education: American Women Learn to Speak
Edited by David Gold with Catherine L. Hobbs
Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional...
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