Jo Ann Campbell

Background

Jo Campbell was born on July 26, 1938 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. She is the daughter of Roger L., an elementary school principal, and Ann Louise (Carlson) Campbel, a teacher.

Education

Campbell attended Valparaiso University and graduated from it with Bachelor of Arts degree in 1980. Also she studied at the Pennsylvania State University and graduated from this university with Master of Arts degree in 1984. One more university which she attended was University of Texas at Austin, she got Doctor of Philosophy degree from it in 1989.

Career

Campbell worked at Indiana University at English department at the position of an assistant professor from 1989 till 1996. From that same year she has worked at Center on Philanthropy as a community service associate.

She is a volunteer in Middle Way House (battered women’s shelter), she has held this post from 1996.

As an author, her primary motivation for writing Toward a Feminist Rhetoric was a desire to honor the work of Gertrude Buck, a remarkable woman professor at Vassar College from 1897 to 1922, whose theories of rhetoric and practices of writing have recently become more mainstream.

Achievements

• Campbell was a finalist of the 2009 National Book Award in fiction for her short-story collection American Salvage.
  
  She won Pushcart Prize for her story “The Smallest Man in the World,” the 1998 Associated Writing Programs Award for short fiction for "Women & Other Animals", and Eudora Welty Prize in 2009 from Southern Review for “The Inventor, 1972.”

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories

    (“Bonnie Jo Campbell is a master of rural America’s postin...)

• Other Work

  • Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck (Pittsburgh Series in Comp, Literacy and Culture)

    (The nature of Gertrude Buck, professor of English at Vass...)

Views

Campbell's position as a woman in higher education, and her struggles in writing on this theme challenges faced by students and colleagues, and contemporary debate on women’s voices have led her to research the writing of the first generation of women to attend colleges and universities in the United States. She had conducted research in archives of women’s colleges, finding student compositions, themes, letters, and diaries that explicitly address the issue of being taught to write in particular ways about certain subjects deemed appropriate to academe. Tied up in learning how to write in the academy are notions of what is considered intelligent, what’s worthy of consideration, and what topics and ways of thinking are substandard. Her questions throughout this research have been about what academia has lost in the process of creating a single acceptable way of thinking and expressing thought, and about how the entry of women into realms of higher education has changed the traditional rhetoric curriculum. Campbell's findings complicate the notion that women have been simply oppressed by writing processes or features that honor rational thought and linear logic in that the irony, play, and skill of these nineteenth-century essays reveal women’s talent for writing within the confines of academic prose. While women are shaped by the traditions of academic writing, they also stretch, challenge, and reshape those traditions.

Membership

Campbell is a member of National Society for Experiential Education.

Connections

Father:

Roger L.

Mother:

Ann Louise Campbell

companion:

Laura Galloway

She is a college administrator.