Lisa King is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary, based on cultural rhetorics with an emphasis in contemporary Native American and Indigenous rhetorics. More specifically, she focuses on the rhetorics of cross-cultural sites such as Indigenous museums and cultural centers, and theorizing cross-cultural pedagogy through the teaching of Indigenous texts in rhetoric and composition classrooms. She is the co-editor of Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics (2015), and author of Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums (2017). Her current work focuses on decolonization as part of the relationship between public Indigenous self-representation and place, including museum sites in Europe, but also at home at UTK’s McClung Museum. Her current projects include a new edited collection co-edited with Andrea Riley Mukavetz, tentatively titled Decolonial Possibilities: Indigenously-Rooted Practices in Rhetoric and Writing, and an Indigenous community-based exhibition at McClung Museum called “A Sense of Indigenous Place.”

"Our institutions too often create silos of knowledge that keep us from identifying larger patterns or working for systemic change that makes a difference inside or outside academia. If we want to change that, my advice to graduate students is to pursue the interdisciplinary connections that they see, and to be thoughtful about their own positions, relationships, and responsibilities to the communities they belong to and the communities they seek to support."