Ruby Nancy is a PhD student in Rhetoric, Writing, & Professional Communication at East Carolina University. Her research interests include social justice and public policy rhetorics, rhetorics of dress and adornment, and the intersections of gender with sexuality and class studies. She is a graduate teaching assistant at ECU and is earning a graduate certificate in Multicultural and Transnational Literatures.

Ms. Nancy has a varied work and service history prior to her career as an academic: officiating at approximately 500 weddings; serving as consulting minister for a Unitarian Universalist congregation; producing entertainment for an LGBTQ pride festival and for an benefit concert series; engaging in community activism; mentoring young parents and training child-care providers; owning a café; working in professional and community theater as a performer and director; and writing theater reviews, features, and page-one stories for a regional newspaper. All of these experiences, in various ways, inform her approach to the social justice issues which figure prominently in her writing, research, and teaching.