Kendyl Harmeling

Education

PhD, Rhetoric and Composition, University of Louisville, 2025
MA, English, University of Louisville, 2021
BA, Early American History, 2019

Research Interests

First-Year Writing Praxis
Community Literacy Studies
Native American, Indigenous, and Settler Colonial Studies

Brief Bio

Kendyl Harmeling, PhD, is a community literacy scholar who teaches and researches community language use and coalition creation. Her research and teaching focus on understanding and generating felt senses of student belonging in the writing classroom, on-campus communities, and in higher education more broadly. 

Dr. Harmeling has worked to build numerous community literacy partnerships, like with the Urban League and Bread Loaf Teacher Network, to deliver community-based literacy community and activity local to given communities’ and organizations’ unique contexts, wants, and needs. Through these partnerships, Dr. Harmeling seeks to engage students in active community literacy engagement.

As a professor of writing, Dr. Harmeling’s courses center how performances of literacies are shaped by and can shape identity formation and community affiliation, rooted to understandings of writing and literacy performance as individualized but not individual acts. We are always literacy-ing within a community, as both sponsored and sponsoring agents with the agentic ability to find and create belonging for ourselves and others via how and why we communicate.

Select Publications

Harmeling, K. et al. “Navigating Writing Center Timescapes: Reflections On Tutor Self Efficacy At University And Community Sites.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 22, no. 2, 2025, pp. 82-91. https://www.praxisuwc.com/222-harmeling-et-al2 

Harmeling, K. “Review: Writing Their Bodies: Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School, by Sarah Klotz.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly vol. 53, no. 5, 2023, pp. 832-835. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2023.2185026