Kristian Ayala is a rhetorician with teaching and research interests in argumentation, Latinx studies, and American literature. He has taught courses on liberal-arts critical thinking and in traditional literary studies, including on genres of the novel and surveys of American literature. Before coming to Menlo College, Ayala taught at Stanford and at high schools in Chicago and New York City.
In his research, Ayala asks how creative and argumentative writers generate ideas to write. In his dissertation, he argues that Latinx writers between the World Wars strategically identified with criollos, or American-born Spaniards during the colonial era. For these writers, invoking criollo origins was a persuasive rhetorical strategy, one that evolved rather than disappeared at mid century. Uncovering this long-lost rhetorical device, Ayala continues the field’s recovery of forgotten texts and synthesizes recent scholarship on Latinx cultural pasts.
