About

Dr. Atkins-Sayre is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication & Film at the University of Memphis. She studies rhetoric, focusing on the role that it plays in forming and reifying identity. Her latest book, Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia's Search for Resilience (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), co-authored with Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, investigates regional resilience using fieldwork and rhetorical readings of food. Her 2016 book, Consuming Identity: The Role of Food in Redefining the South (University Press of Mississippi), also co-authored with Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, explores the role that food plays in creating Southern identity.   She has also co-edited three books: City Places, Country Spaces: Rhetorical Explorations of the Urban/Rural Divide (with Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, Peter Lang, 2020), Communicating Advice: Peer Tutoring and Communication Practice (with Eunkyong Yook, Peter Lang, 2015), and Communication Centers and Oral Communication in Higher Education (with Eunkyong Yook, Lexington, 2012).  Her research has also appeared in Western Journal of Communication, Southern Communication Journal, Public Relations Inquiry, Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, and Women & Language, as well as numerous edited volumes.    

Education

PhD, University of Georgia, 2005
MA, Texas State University, 1996
BA, Texas State University, 1994

Sample Publications

Stokes, Ashli Q., and Wendy Atkins-Sayre. (2024) Hungry Roots: How Food Communicates Appalachia's Search for Resilience. University of South Carolina Press.

Atkins-Sayre, Wendy, & Stokes, Ashli Q. (Eds.). (2020). City Places, Country Spaces: Rhetorical Explorations of the Urban/Rural Divide. Peter Lang (Frontiers in Political Communication series).

Stokes, Ashli, & Wendy Atkins-Sayre. (2018). PETA, Rhetorical Fracture, and the Power of Digital Activism. Public Relations Inquiry, 7, 149-170.

Stokes, Ashli Q., & Atkins-Sayre, Wendy. (2016). Consuming Identity: The Role of Food in Redefining the South. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (Race, Rhetoric, and Media series).

Atkins-Sayre, Wendy, & Yook, Eunkyong. (Eds.). (2015). Communicating Advice: Peer Tutoring and Communication Practice. New York: Peter Lang.

Atkins-Sayre, Wendy. (2010). Articulating Identity: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Animal/Human Divide. Western Journal of Communication, 74, 309-328.