Allison Rowland

Allison Rowland, Maurer Associate Professor of Performance & Communication Arts

I grew up in rural New Jersey. Many people think rural New Jersey doesn't exist, but it does--I had to pass three goat farms on the way to elementary school! Even though neither of my parents have college degrees, I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a professor. 

I think the question that animated my earliest scholarly inquiry was, "why do people believe what they believe?" I thought I could find the answers in a psychology degree at James Madison University in Virginia, which was helpful, but didn't fully scratch the itch. Then I thought a Masters of Research in Critical, Social, and Cultural Psychology at the University of Bath in England would help me finally answer that question, and it did nudge me a little bit closer. 

But the best answer to that question, for me, resides in the humanities. My PhD is in rhetoric from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since I graduated from that program in 2014, I now study the way that people are deeply formed by public discourse.