Patricia Roberts-Miller

Patricia Roberts-Miller, formerly Director of the University Writing Center and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, is a scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation—that is, times that communities made decisions they later regretted, although they had all the information they needed to make better ones. She is the author of Speaking of Race: Constructive Conversations About an Explosive Topic (The Experiment, January 2021), Rhetoric and Demagoguery, (Southern Illinois UP, 2019; finalist Rhetoric Society of America book of the year), Demagoguery and Democracy (The Experiment, 2017), Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus (University of Alabama Press, 2009), Deliberate Conflict: Composition Classes and Political Spaces (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere (University of Alabama Press, 1999), and various book chapters and articles.