Erin Kathleen Bahl

Erin Kathleen Bahl is Associate Professor of Applied and Professional Writing, as well as the department's inaugural Social Media and Branding Coordinator. Her work focuses on creating knowledge, telling stories, and designing for access via digital scholarship, webcomics, folklore, and interactive narrative. Along with Chris Andrews, she is co-editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. 

Her first book is Storied Objects: A Graphic Narrative Reflection on Material Metaphors and Digital Writing (Parlor Press, 2025). Storied Objects is a comics-form monograph that investigates metaphor in digital scholarship through autoethnographic narrative and reflective multimodal methods. Bahl examines material metaphor as rhetorical invention strategy through a deep dive into one creator’s approach to designing digital scholarship. Storied Objects is the inaugural book in Parlor Press's Comics and Graphic Narratives Series, co-edited by Sergio Figueiredo, Jason Helms, and Anastasia Salter.

Other publications include scholarly and creative work in Kairos; Computers and Composition Online; The Journal of American Folklore; enculturation: a journal of writing, rhetoric, and culture; Technical Communication Quarterly; The Digital Review; Graphic RHM; The Digital Rhetoric Collaborative; Composition Studies; Humanities Journal; and The Smithsonian's Folklife Magazine, as well as several edited collections.

Her dissertation, "Refracting Webtexts: Invention and Design in Composing Multimodal Scholarship," won the 2018 Computers and Composition Hugh Burns Dissertation Award. Her collaborative webtext "The Rhetoric of Description: Embodiment, Power, and Playfulness in Representations of the Visual," co-authored with Margaret Price, received the 2023 Kairos Best Webtext Award.

ORCID: 0000-0003-1073-6030