Wallace Golding is a rhetorical critic and historian of race and reparative justice and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication. He also holds a graduate minor in the Department of African American Studies. His work is animated by questions of how non-dominant individuals and groups deploy political language to define their identities, challenge dominant understandings of citizenship and belonging, and advocate change in democratic practice and policy, as well as how these political languages evolve over time and space. His dissertation investigates the rhetorical history of Black reparations advocacy in the U.S. from emancipation to the present.

Wallace teaches courses in public speaking and writing, rhetorical criticism, public policy, and visual rhetoric. In the past, he has served as a peer leader for CMN 111/112 (Oral and Written Communication I/II) and as President of the Communication Graduate Student Association. In fall 2022, he helped launch the Speaking Center at Illinois, a joint student-support initiative between the Department of Communication and University Library that provides free presentation and public speaking support to Illinois students and staff. In addition to his teaching, he currently directs the Center and its staff.

A native of Memphis, TN, Wallace received his B.A. in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (2018) and M.A. in Communication from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2020). His work has received awards such as the Robert Bostrom Young Scholar Award from the Southern States Communication Association, the Nichols-Ehninger Award from the National Communication Association's Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division, and other divisional awards from regional and national conferences.