Davida H Charney
Professor, Department of English, College of Liberal Arts
Phone: +1 512 567 3144
Email: dcharney@austin.utexas.edu
Davida Charney is an expert on argumentation in academic and public settings. She examines both what persuasive strategies authors choose and how readers respond to them. Her early research focused on academic journal articles and technical/professional texts such as computer manuals and job résumés. She uses mixed methods in her research and has argued for the importance and ethical character of experiments and quantitative methods. Later in her career, she studied public policy argument and co-authored a college textbook, Having Your Say. Most recently, she has studied persuasion in the Hebrew Bible, particularly the Book of Psalms. She is the author of "Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms" (2015). She has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholars grant to study the reception of the psalms by Jewish theologians in the Middle Ages. Her research contributes to our understanding of how rhetoric works, how effective texts are constructed, and how people read, write and learn.