She is best known for her 1998 book Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: Rhetoric of Therapy in which she coined the term "rhetoric of therapy".
Cloud was a faculty member in the department of communication studies, part of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, from January 1993 to August 2015.
[1] From August 2015 to May 2019, Cloud was a professor and the director of graduate studies at Syracuse University.
Cloud, who was a communications and rhetorical studies professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse, is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (against Israel) movement and describes her views as radical liberalism.
[2] Cloud’s research interests include critical rhetorical and cultural studies, including Marxist theory, feminist theory, public sphere theory, and postmodernism; the rhetoric of social movements; representations of sex, gender, and race in popular media; activist scholarship; and scholarship about activism.