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 most concerned with the intersections of the global animal rights movement with human-oriented political & justice movements. For example, using their situated knowledge as an autistic person, Dr. Muller examines how anti-autistic ableism and anti-farmed animal speciesism intersect and bolster one another in dominant discourses of “humane slaughter.” By examining the intersections of animalization, dehumanization, speciesism, and other oppressive -isms, Dr. Muller uses prescriptive rhetorical methods to suggest ethics, policies, and linguistic shifts conducive to total liberation and multispecies justice.

When life permits, Dr. Muller devotes an absurd amount of time watching (and a small amount of time writing about) professional wrestling. Since they are old and cannot do a proper body slam, they cope by practicing karate and Muay Thai outside of work.