Kelly Happe

Dr. Happe, Professor of Communication Studies and Women's and Gender Studies, is a rhetorical theorist and critic working at the intersection of feminism, science studies, biopolitics, and Marxist theory. Her scholarship has appeared in Theory and Event, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, New Genetics and Society, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and other venues.  Her book, The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity After the Human Genome Project was published by NYU Press and is winner of the 2014 Diamond Anniversary Book Award from the National Communication Association. Dr. Happe is also the recipient of the 2014 Golden Anniversary Monograph Award for her essay "The Body of Race: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Racial Ideology,” also from the National Communication Association. She is co-editor of the 2018 book Biocitizenship: On Bodies, Belonging, and the Politics of Life.

Most recently, she was awarded the 2019 Creative Research Medal for the Humanities and Arts by the University of Georgia. In 2017-2018, she completed a Study in a Second Discipline Fellowship in the Department of Genetics with one of the nation's leading epigenetics researchers.  The fellowship is part of her ongoing work on the social history and philosophy of biological concepts. She continues work on a series of essays on rhetoric, utopia, and radical economic thought, and is co-editing a book on the rhetorics of care. Her next book, titled The Body Plastic: Abstraction, Speculation, and Difference in Late Capitalism is under contract with NYU Press. The book shows how speculation in the life sciences—in regenerative medicine, epigenetics, and resilience research—produces new meanings of racial difference through novel engagements not just with the body's future potential but with the abiding influences of its past. By focusing on logics of finance and changing meanings of difference, the book thus provides a much-needed update to studies of the commodification of science as well as theories of finance and neoliberalism that tend to ignore the role of racial difference in speculative practices.

In addition to their scholarship, Prof. Happe teaches courses in rhetorical theory, feminist theory, social movements, queer theory, capitalism studies, and science and society. In 2019 she was selected to teach in UGA’s Study Abroad program in Oxford, UK. She serves on the editorial boards of Quarterly Journal of Speech and Rhetoric and Public Affairs and has served as Book Review Editor for Philosophy and Rhetoric since 2017.

Professor Happe received their PhD in rhetoric, with a secondary emphasis in media studies and cultural studies, at the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of Carol Stabile. While there, she also studied extensively with faculty in the Cultural Studies program and the History and Philosophy of Science department and her work was supported by the Cultural Studies Fellowship and the Mellon Pre-doctoral Fellowship. She has been active in local community organizing, serving as a board member for the organization Athens for Everyone (including serving as its President for two years) and leading its coalitional efforts to institute criminal justice reform in Athens, GA. She is a proud member of Local 3265 of the United Campus Workers of Georgia.

Recent and upcoming talks:

“Afterlives of Slavery, Historical Materialism, and Rhetorical Agency.” National Communication Association, Denver, November 2025.

“Utopia Without Guarantees.” Fail Again, Fail Better? Recuperating Failure in Utopian Politics and Research. AHRC Research Networking Grant, UK. Workshop on “Utopia and Failure,” King’s College Dickson Poon School of Law, September 8-9, 2025, London. 

Seminar on The Body Plastic. Queen Mary University of London, School of Law. London, September 10, 2025.