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Fig. 1 Sweta’s Photo taken by Leslie King

Dr. Sweta Baniya is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Professional, and Technical Writing in the Department of English at Virginia Tech. She is the recipient of the 2025 Rhetoric Society of America’s Fellows’ Early Career Award. She serves as an Affiliate Faculty in the Women and Gender Studies Program. Dr. Baniya earned her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from the Department of English at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She has two Master’s Degrees from Tribhuvan University and Pokhara University in Nepal. She is the author of Transnational Assemblages: Social Justice and Crisis Communication During Disaster and 40 peer-reviewed articles published in various national and international interdisciplinary journals within Humanities, Technical Communication, Disaster studies, and Engineering.

swr-transnational-assemblages-baniya
Fig 2. My Book! Cover Image: Kishor Sharma

Her book features case studies on the 2015 Nepal Earthquake and the 2017 Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, offering strategies for researchers and practitioners to rethink complex, digitally mediated crisis communication through social justice and transcultural frameworks. The book is available for :

Her second book, Rhetorics of Disaster: Transnational Feminist Actions and Approaches to COVID-19, is under advanced contract with The Ohio State University Press (New Directions in Rhetoric and Materiality series). Her third book is a collaborative project with Dr. Liza Potts, currently in the proposal stage.

Fig. 3 USCIS 100 Civic Questions Mobile Application.

Dr. Baniya has also led a community-based project in collaboration with refugee women in the Blacksburg/Roanoke area, developing a mobile application to support preparation for the U.S. Citizenship Exam. Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Seed Grant, this project uses participatory action research and knowledge justice theory to design digital tools that address the challenges refugees face in gaining U.S. citizenship. You can download this application for free by clicking on the photo or here via this link.

She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses at Virginia Tech, focusing on global rhetorics, international community engagement, and risk communication. Her research is shaped by her experience as a communication practitioner and community organizer, with scholarly interests in disaster response, non-Western rhetorical traditions, and feminist rhetorics. She is a founding member and former moderator of #NextGen, the first international graduate student listserv in the field.

Her dissertation received the 2021 CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication (Honorable Mention). She has also been recognized with the Coalition of Community Writing Emerging Scholars Award. Overall, Dr. Baniya has received 14 + major awards for her scholarship and service, including national and international recognitions such as the CCCC Chair’s Memorial Award (2020), CCCC Scholars for the Dream Award (2019), CPTSC and Bedford St. Martin’s Diversity Scholarship Award (2019), ATTW Amplification Award (2019), and the Kairos Service Award for Graduate Students and Adjuncts (2019). She has also been awarded nine competitive grants and five national and international fellowships.

Before her academic career, she worked for eight years as an English News Reader and Editor for Nepal’s national radio, Radio Nepal, and for nearly three years as a journalist with the Nepal Bureau of China’s official Xinhua News Agency. She later transitioned into professional writing roles with nonprofit organizations, including the United Nations, as a Communications Officer/Associate. In her personal time, Dr. Baniya enjoys writing fiction, poetry, and monologues, which she publishes on her blog The Coffee House Revival and in local Nepali newspapers.

Here’s her CV

Baniya-CV-2025Download

Contact and Other Information

Interdisciplinary Research

This research aims at finding out how the intersections of humanities and technology during the freshmen year will help students develop better rhetorical understanding of the real world like the corporate world, social world, political world.

Risk and Crisis Communication

Risk Communications is my major research area. Ranging from my dissertation project to various publications, I am invested in finding ways to minimize environmental, and natural risks via establishing proper communication mechanisms.

Community Engagement

Community Engagement is the heart and soul of my teaching philosophy. My research on risk communication is also motivated by how can community be engaged during the time of risk.

“Sweta is committed to her work and spends a lot of time preparing for class. I hope that continues to partner with an organization in Lafayette because I learned a lot about communication and professional ethos through my contact with the organization and the Service Learning Office. There was a lot of writing in this course, and practicing writing definitely helped me to improve. Additionally, our first project that was focused on applying to a job helped me to craft and extremely well-written cover letter and resume that I used for applying to the Fed”


(Student, Fall 2018 Undergraduate Class Business Communication)

Students Response

The instructor offered constructive feedback on every assignment to improve our papers. She not only made the class discussion-based, but she also “taught” the subject matter effectively. Many times, instructors just give discussion questions for the students but never explain the core concepts. However, her presentations have been/will be very helpful for my future reference. I also liked how she designed the course, i.e., reading responses, 2 conference papers, and 1 journal paper. Although it seems a little hectic, still, it worked for me very well. At the end of the semester, I have almost 2 manuscripts ready for sending to journals. I also liked the reading list. All the readings gave me a comprehensive understanding of publics, counterpublics, transnational and transcultural publics, assemblages, crisis publics, and affective publics.

(Student, Spring 2021, PhD Seminar: Rhetoric in Society)

Student Response