Florianne “Bo” Jimenez (PhD '21) was recently awarded the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation Award for her dissertation, Echoing and Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonization. After reviewing a highly-competitive field of submissions, the Dissertation Award Committee selected Jimenez’s work as the strongest dissertation completed in 2021 by a student member of the Rhetoric Society of America. Her dissertation was directed by Dr. Rebecca Lorimer Leonard (UMass Amherst, English), and with advising from Dr. Haivan Hoang (UMass Amherst, English), Dr. Richard Chu (UMass Amherst, History), and Dr. Amy Wan (Queens College - CUNY, English).
Jimenez's dissertation is an archival and qualitative research project on Filipino students' rhetoric at the turn of the 20th century in the American colonial classroom. Using rhetorical analysis and close reading, as well as grant-supported historical research at the American Historical Collection in Manila, Philippines, the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, and the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., Jimenez established a theory of rhetorical production that simultaneously accounted for the pressures on students to acquiesce and assimilate under American colonial control, and the articulation of Filipino self-determination. A version of one chapter of the project has appeared in a recent issue of the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, and Jimenez has two more chapters in edited collections in process. Jimenez is also working on a book proposal for a monograph based on the dissertation.
Currently, Jimenez is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Co-Director of the Writing Center. Her teaching and research areas are writing center theory and practice, first-year writing, global Englishes, and writing and race.