Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is an American academic specializing in rhetorical criticism at the University of Minnesota. Background Campbell was born on April 16, 1937, near Blomkest, Minnesota. She attended Willmar High School and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Macalester College, St. Paul, in 1958. She earned a Master of Arts (1959) and a Ph.D. (1968) from the University of Minnesota. Professional life Campbell has taught at the State University of New York at Brockport; the British College in Palermo, Sicily; Macalester College; California State University, Los Angeles; the State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of Kansas, Lawrence, where she was director of the women’s studies program; and at the University of Minnesota, where she chaired the Department of Communication Studies for nine years. She also edited the Quarterly Journal of Speech for three years. She was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School in 1992. Theoretical Contributions Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is currently a professor at the University of Minnesota where she teaches courses such as Seminar in Rhetorical Criticism, Intro to Rhetorical Criticism, and Rhetoric of Feminism. Her specialties include women in communication, rhetorical theory and criticism, presidential rhetoric, and political campaigns. One of her most famous works in which she incorporates her rhetorical ideas is Agency: Promiscuous and Protean. In this essay, she attempts to proclaim the meanings of agency by referencing Sojourner Truth at the 1851 woman's rights convention. This is just one of the many examples in which she incorporates her interest in feminism and feminist rhetoric into her own works. Another significant work Campbell contributed to is Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genre of Governance, which was co-written with Kathleen Hall Jamieson and published in 1990. In 2008, a contemporary, updated edition called Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words was published. In these two works, Campbell and Jamieson create a monumental framework for analyzing the rhetoric surrounding presidential oratory. They argue that the presidency is defined by what the president says and how they say it. Through the framework that Campbell and Jamieson create, they describe the different situations and actions in which presidents operate, such as inaugural addresses, special inaugural addresses in the ascension of a vice president, national eulogies, pardoning rhetoric, state of the union addresses, veto messages, the signing statement as the