Dr. Sara Humphreys

Sara Humphreys (she, her, elle) is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Academic and Technical Writing Program and Media Studies. She completed her BA-Honours at Nipissing University (located in Northern Ontario) as a mature student. She then took a leap of faith and completed an MA in English at the University of Toronto. A rhetorician at the University of Toronto, the late Dr. Michael Dixon, suggested she pursue a PhD at the University of Waterloo with a focus on rhetoric. She ended up with a specialty in Discourse and Text Analysis along with a healthy dose of Rhetoric.

Her primary areas of interest lie within the field of Rhetorical Genre Studies, particularly in terms of how genres can function to accommodate, affect, oppress, and even liberate different audiences and negotiate multiple traditions of communication in varied social contexts. She was elected the Vice-President and Conference Chair for the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing (2026-2027). She also serves on Senate (2026-2029) and is active in the Faculty Association in several capacities. Teaching, research, and service are interconnected: each one informs the other.

At the undergraduate and graduate levels, she teaches with the aim to open doors for students who might otherwise face barriers reaching their academic goals. She encourages students to see composition and rhetoric(s) from the perspective of their own communities, narratives, knowledges, and histories. She firmly believes in the power of composition and rhetoric to give students agency by understanding how their realities are forged via language. She hopes her students leave her courses with a sense of their responsibilities as scholars, writers, and thinkers in the publics and communities they occupy.

Selected Publications

Humphreys, Sara. Working in the Thunderdome: Coalitions and Community as Resistance. 8.2 (summer 2026). CWCA/ACCR.

Humphreys, Sara. “Monstrous Daughters and Dead Fathers in Last of Us 2.” Hellbent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western. Eds. Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca Lush, and Sara Spurgeon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, January, 2025.

Humphreys, Sara, Gaudet, Loren, Collins, Jason, Boldt, Natalie. Writing & Power: Positions and Policies for Social Change, December 2024. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1828/20876.

Humphreys, Sara. Manifest Destiny 2.0: Genre Trouble in Game Worlds. University of Nebraska Press, 2021.

Humphreys Sara, Darroch Heidi, Maftei Micaela. “Writing Instruction, Academic Labour, and Professional Development.” Intro (co-authored). Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, 29, 133-136. https://doi.org/10.31468/cjsdwr.817 edited by Darroch, H., Maftei, M., & Humphreys, S. (2019).

Humphreys, Sara. “Creating a Playable Academic Edition of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea or How Games can Decolonize.” KULA: knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation studies, 3.1 (2019). DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/kula.48

Humphreys, Sara. “How Kenneth Burke Can Explain Hannah Duston’s Appeal (and Other Things).” Literature, Rhetoric, and Values. Eds. Randy Harris, Murray McArthur and Shelley Hulan. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, December 2012. 147-167.

Fellowships and Awards

• 2026 Learning and Teaching Innovation (UVic), Study of Teaching and Learning (SoTL Grant), Leveraging First year Writing Courses to Teach GenAI Literacies
• 2025 SSHRC Connection Grant (PI), Rhetoric, Writing, and Discourse Today
• 2024 SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grant (PI), Writing and Power: Positions and Policies for Social Change
• 2022 Research Grant, Associate Dean Research, Humanities
• 2022 Learning and Teaching Innovation (UVic), Open Education Resource Grant
• 2020, BCcampus Award for Excellence in Open Education, BCcampus
• 2020, Open Scholarship Awards, INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments), Honourable Mention
• 2017, Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory Open Knowledge Practicum and Fellowship

Current Research

As a rhetorical genre studies scholar, Sara remains fascinated by the durability of genres and their influence. This fascination is where her two research paths intersect: Canadian Writing Studies as a genre and how game worlds remediate genres.

She is currently co-editing a collection with Dr. Loren Gaudet titled Rhetoric, Writing, and Discourse Today that shares rhetorical, linguistic, and pedagogical research regarding AI dominance, white technocratic regimes, environmental challenges, and rapid changes in global relations. Rhetoric, Writing, and Discourse Today offers wayfinding through turbulence, meaning an opportunity to bring together early career researchers, students, student support experts, and senior scholars to both look forward and back in order to debate where and how we can effect change in real time. Given the increased and urgent calls to address gaps in digital literacies, linguistic and citational justice, as well as decolonial and anti-oppressive pedagogies, a collaborative and cross-disciplinary analysis of how communication is being transformed or even ruptured in Canadian contexts is urgently needed.

She also working on a book-length project that expands on the analysis of sex, gender, and genre in her first book. Focusing on a variety of games including Disco Elysium, Stardew Valley, Red Dead Redemption 2, Last of Us 2, and GTA V and VI, she argues sex and romance in cinematics and in gameplay not only inform a shared experience of sexual norms and values but persuade players that these conventions should be valued in specific ways (e.g. queer, normal etc…). Put another way, sex and romance in gameworlds (re)create structures of feeling.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

• ATWP135 Academic Reading and Writing
• ATWP250 Genres of Business Communication
• ENGR240 Technical Communication
• MDIA360 Game Studies

Graduate

• HUMA500 Professional Academic Writing