Dustin (Dusty) Hixenbaugh is Assistant Instructor of Rhetoric & Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught courses in the Departments of English and Spanish. Before coming to UT, he taught English at La Joya High School on the Texas-Mexico border. In 2006, the La Joya Independent School District named him its Teacher of the Year. In 2015, he received the Department of Rhetoric and Writing’s Hairston Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Dustin’s research focuses on the literary history of the United States and Latin America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He is completing a dissertation on Cuban, Mexican, and U.S. American writers who negotiated their transnational identities through the conventions of the historical romance. He is also interested in popular memory, representations of race and gender, the Spanish-language press in the United States, and country music. His work is supervised by John Morán González and César A. Salgado.

Since 2014, Dustin has contributed to two podcast series. Zeugma is sponsored by the Digital Writing & Research Lab (DWRL) and reflects on the intersections between rhetoric and technology. LitWit, which he co-hosts with his friend Carly Sweder, reaches a more general audience of readers and teachers.

You can follow Dustin on Twitter, Academic.edu, Goodreads, and Instagram.