New Faculty Spotlight: Fernando Sanchez

Fernando Sánchez joins the Department of Writing Studies as an associate professor fall 2025. Fernando graduated with his PhD from Purdue University’s English program in 2016 with specializations in technical writing and rhetoric/composition. He has spent the previous nine years as an assistant and associate professor in the University of St. Thomas’ English department developing their professional writing track. Get to know more about Fernando below. 

 

I can’t believe how lucky I am to be a part of this department. I’m excited to talk with students about how artifacts like policies, documents, and technologies impact communities and in turn how communities (particularly marginalized ones) reclaim these to accomplish their communicative goals. And I’m beyond excited to get to work with such fantastic colleagues whose scholarship centers on important topics at the intersections of rhetoric, writing, and technical communication.

 

I like to focus our time together on theory and practice— often beyond the classroom. This has meant partnering with local organizations to apply what we are learning in class into a structured experience with outside agencies as well as mentoring students on applying for jobs and careers after graduation. I am very much looking forward to learning more about the culture within the program and the university to attune these experiences to our students' needs.

 

I’m currently working on a book manuscript focused on bridging posthuman and participatory frameworks in technical and professional communication scholarship. It’s based on my previous article on how the Frogtown community in St. Paul created and submitted a comic book as their planning document to the city council a few years back. I’m having a lot of fun with it as I get to write about comics, AI, UX, and the Black Arts Movement from the 1970s. Beyond that, I’d like to come back to my previous work on the built environment and urban design documents.

 

I get to teach the capstone for the undergraduate majors (WRIT 4999) this year! I've been eager to teach a class like this for a very long time. I'm looking forward to learning from our students about their aspirations and hopes as they near the completion of their degree. I’m also eager to teach WRIT 5501 - Usability and Human Factors and a course on tactical technical communication, which would focus on how publics utilize technology and technical knowledge for wide-ranging purposes. My hope would be to have students utilize 3-D modeling software to render users' ideas for redesigned prototypes.

 

I’ll sneak in two really quickly. The first is that I had a previous career as a mental health therapist. I have an MS in counseling psychology from UW-Madison. Secondly, although I’ve only been skydiving once, I’d love to do it again. It’s both exhilarating and surprisingly serene.