Karen Schroeder

A native of Huron, SD, Karen Schroeder was an exchange student to Bremen, Germany, when the country was still split into Democratic and Communist halves. This experience seeded an interest in rhetoric and persuasion: how beliefs and values manifest and spread in different geographies and cultures.

For nearly 6 years in the early 2000s, she worked for Concordia Language Villages, first in public relations and then in marketing and communications. These experiences have often served as a foundation to help inform her teaching in business and professional writing.

Toward the end of her time at the Language Villages, she began teaching business writing classes at night as a fun hobby, but she eventually decided that teaching should become her day job.

As a result, she began working toward her PhD in Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture from North Dakota State University in Fargo. She was inducted to Phi Kappa Phi, elected to student senate as a graduate senator, and won the English Department’s graduate teaching award for classroom excellence.

Dr. Schroeder has published articles on online networked knowledge communities and transcontinental synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.

Published in 2017, her first book, “Cosmos and the Rhetoric of Popular Science,” focuses on Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos series on PBS. It examines how the mythos created with these types of popular science programs creates a misunderstanding of the “reality” of the concepts presented.

Her second book, “Fringe Rhetorics: Conspiracy Theories and the Paranormal,” was published just last year. This book investigates how conspiracy theory and paranormal arguments are structured and how they intersect. It gathers research from political science, sociopsychology, and rhetoric to create a template for interrogating these arguments.

Dr. Schroeder teaches courses on grant and proposal writing, technical writing, expository writing, composition, and writing instruction. Her classes are available in person or asynchronously online.