Kathryn Lambrecht completed her PhD in rhetoric and composition at the University of Nevada, Reno and she currently teaches Technical Communication at ASU. Her research focuses on risk and visual communication, particularly extreme heat communication, weather hazard visualization, and health risk outreach. She primarily draws on data visualization, rhetorical methodologies, eye tracking, and corpus linguistic methods to strengthen communication between different types of audiences.
Because interdisciplinary communication is central to her research, she often collaborates with colleagues from different disciplines and organizations including the National Weather Service, public health, and local municipalities. Her research has been published in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Technical Communication Quarterly, the Bulletin of American Meteorological Society, Geoscience Communication, and Computers and Composition.
She is currently serving as the PI on a grant project funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to strengthen forecast visualizations that communicate weather risk using probabilistic information. In 2024, she will begin work as a co-PI on a project with the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality to design and test visualizations about community water resources and environmental messaging.
Education
Ph.D., English: Rhetoric and Composition, University of Nevada Reno, 2018
M.A., English: Writing, University of Nevada Reno, 2013
B.A., English: Language and Linguistics and B.A., Political Science, University of Nevada Reno, 2011
Risk communication, visual communication, extreme heat, interdisciplinary communication, weather hazard visualization, digital mapping, memes, rhetoric of science, topology, corpus linguistics, graduate education
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Heggli, Anne, Benjamin Hatchett, Zach Tolby, Kathryn Lambrecht, Meghan Collins, Lynda Olman, and Matthew Jeglum. “Visual communication of probabilistic information to enhance decision support.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0220.1
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “’These Nevada memes are coming out faster than the results’: Community power and public solidarity in 2020 election memes.” Computers and Composition, vol. 68, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2023.102779
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “Working to resonate: Rhetorical mapping of disciplinary stances about technology, risk, and the brain.” Technical Communication Quarterly, vol. 32(2), 196-211, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1080/10572252.2022.2100484
Lambrecht, Kathryn, Benjamin Hatchett, Kristin VanderMolen, & Bianca Feldkircher. “Identifying community values related to heat: Recommendations for forecast and health risk communication.” Geoscience Communication, vol. 4, 517-525, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-4-517-2021
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “Tracking the Differentiation of Risk: The Impact of Subject-Framing in CDC Communication Regarding COVID-19.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 35(1), 94-100, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651920958394
Lambrecht, Kathryn, Meghan Sweeney, & Jane Detweiler. “The Everywhere and Nowhere Skill: Sustaining the Assessment of Analytical Reading as Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum.” The Journal of General Education, vol. 68(3-4), 169-190, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5325/jgeneeduc.68.3-4.0169
Lambrecht, Kathryn, Benjamin Hatchett, Lynda Walsh, Meghan Collins, and Zach Tolby. “Improving Visual Communication of Weather Forecasts with Rhetoric.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 100(4), 557-563, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-18-0186.1
Hatchett, Benjamin, Tarik Benmarhnia, Kristen Guirguis, Kristin VanderMolen, Alexander Gershynov, Andrey Khlystov, Kathryn Lambrecht, Vera Samburova. “Mobility data to aid assessment of human responses to extreme environmental conditions.” The Lancet: Planetary Health, vol. 5(10), e665-e667, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00261-8
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “Mapping the Rhetorical and Statistical Landscape of COVID-19 and Neoliberalism’s Biopolitics.” In A Charge for Change: A Selection of Essays from the 20th Biennial Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America edited by Elizabethada A. Wright and David Beard. Parlor Press, 61-70, 2023. https://parlorpress.com/products/a-charge-for-change
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “Moving from Categories to Continuums: How Corpus Analysis Tools Reveal Disciplinary Tension in Context.” Composition and Big Data, edited by Amanda Licastro and Benjamin Miller. University of Pittsburgh Press, 125-137, 2021. https://upittpress.org/books/9780822946748/
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “From Imposter to "Double Agent": Leveraging Liminality as Expertise.” Standing at the Threshold: Working Through Liminality in the Composition and Rhetoric TAship, edited by Macauley, Anglesey, Edwards, Lambrecht, and Lovas. University Press of Colorado, 132-149, 2021. https://upcolorado.com/utah-state-university-press/item/4006-standing-at-the-threshold
Proceedings
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “’The eyes don’t lie’: How eye-tracking doubles as a research and pedagogical tool.” The 41st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication (Accepted).
Lambrecht, Kathryn. “Accountability and Accessibility in Heat Communication and Safety.” The 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, 177- 182, 2021.
Mara, Andrew, Michael Madson, Kathryn Lambrecht, and Steven Garry. “Mediating Digital Interfaces to Negotiate Tensions between Science Communication Spheres.” The 39th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, 362- 364,2021.
