Sarah Tinker Perrault joined Oregon State University as associate professor of rhetoric and writing, and director of the Writing Intensive Curriculum program, in fall of 2020.

Before coming to OSU, Sarah was a faculty member the University of California-Davis for 11 years. She has a BA in Anthropology from Reed College (1991), and MFA in nonfiction writing from Northern Michigan University (2004), and a PhD in rhetoric and composition from the University of Nevada-Reno (2009).

Sarah does research on science writing, writing pedagogy, and writing across the curriculum. Her book, Communicating Popular Science: From Deficit to Democracy, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, and she is now working on a book about rhetorical approaches to teaching science writing. Her articles have appeared in journals including the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching,  Composition Studies, Information Design Journal, The American Journal of Bioethics, and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, and she has chapters in Renewing Rhetoric’s Relations to Composition: Essays in Honor of Theresa Jarnagin Enos and in Public Interest Design Education Guidebook: Curricula, Strategies, and SEED Academic Case Studies.

During her academic career, Sarah has taught undergraduate writing classes (first year and advanced composition, essay writing, research papers, creative nonfiction, and writing in science and engineering), undergraduate classes in rhetoric (rhetoric of popular science, rhetoric of science, history of scientific writing), and graduate  classes for MA and PhD students from many disciplines (composition pedagogy, thesis/dissertation writing, and rhetorical genre theory).