Faculty Profiles

Dr. S. Marek Muller was born and raised in Denver, CO. Since then, they have lived and taught all around the world in locations ranging from Muncie, Indiana to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. They received their PhD in Communication from the University of Utah. Dr. Muller came to TXST in Summer 2023 after four years of teaching in the School of Communication & Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Now that they have landed in San Marcos, Dr. Muller is excited to be a member of the Bobcat Community and to join TXST in its Run to R1.

Dr. Muller is a rhetorician concerned with the many competing (and often contradicting) discourses of animal rights & welfare. They study how the pernicious ideology of “speciesism” manifests in language and how that language is used to justify the exploitation of nonhuman animals. Their work is concerned with the intersections and overlaps of global “animal rights” movements with “human-rights” movements.

More recently, Dr. Muller’s work has pivoted into the world of new food biotechnologies with an emphasis on cell- and plant-based meat alternatives. Marek studies how acceptance/rejection of prototypical and atypical “meat” items functions rhetorically in political and identitarian discourses.

With tenure now achieved, Marek is probably going to study AI because that’s where all the cool kids are hanging out. Also, AI can teach communication scholars a lot about what it means to be human and relate with more-than-human world.