Nelesi Rodrigues

Nelesi Rodrigues (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy (ISUP) with a shared appointment at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE). She has a Ph.D. in Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh.

Nelesi’s experiences as a Luso Venezuelan migrant living in Turtle Island, an English writing teacher, and a life-long dance practitioner inform her scholarly research. One question serves as a through line in her work: How can attention to movement––creative, geographical, political––help us develop more just and accessible pedagogies? Her projects often find answers to this question in informal, community-based learning contexts such as a transnational dance theatre company or a feminist cycling collective. Nelesi’s research has been recognized through several competitive fellowships, including the Fulbright Foreign Student Program Fellowship and the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Her writing has been published in the journals Spectator and Inmaterial, and her most recent work will be included in Rhetorica in Motion II: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies (co-edited by Eileen E. Schell et al.)

As a teacher, Nelesi recognizes that students’ particular lived experiences before and during their college years shape the ways in which they relate to English, writing, and academia. She believes that inviting students’ full selves and different ways of knowing into writing classrooms widens the range of what is possible. In her pedagogical practice, she works to cultivate learning environments characterized by reflection, experimentation, trust, and accountability. In addition to teaching writing courses, Nelesi has worked as a writing centre tutor, a tutor for the Pitt Prison Education Project, a mentor for graduate instructors, and a creative movement facilitator with older adults and intergenerational communities.