Rhetoricity

Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth: Afterwords

This special episode of Rhetoricity features a roundtable that also serves as the "Afterwords" for a forthcoming collection entitled Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth. That collection is edited by Scott Sundvall, Caddie Alford, and Ira Allen and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2026. The featured panelists are James Ball, Barbara Biesecker, Omedi Ochieng, Robin Reames, and Ryan Skinnell. See below for more detailed bios of the panelists. The roundtable focuses on key questions from Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth: what we mean by "post-truth," how it intersects with rhetoric, and what challenges that intersection poses for us in the world to come. James Ball is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and author, a fellow of the think tank Demos, and the political editor of The New European. Ball also played a key role in The Guardian's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden. He is the author of multiple books, including Post-Truth and The Tangled Web We Weave: Inside The Shadow System That Shapes the Internet. His most recent book, The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated The World was published by Bloomsbury in July 2023. Barbara Biesecker is Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia and author of the recently published Reinventing World War II: Popular Memory in the Rise of the Ethnonationalist State. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including the National Communication Association's Douglas Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award, the Francine Merritt Award, and the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division's Outstanding Mentor Award and Distinguished Scholar Award. She served as editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Journal of Speech from 2013–2016 and continues to serve on multiple editorial boards. Omedi Ochieng specializes in Africana philosophical and intellectual thought, Black radicalism, and criticism. He is the author of two books: Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy and The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy. He is currently working on a project on Black insurgent ecology. Robin Reames is the Culbertson Chair of Writing in the Department of English at Indiana University's College of Arts and Sciences. Her research explores the relationship between language and metaphysics in ancient Greek rhetoric. She explored aspects of this relationship in her first book, Seeming and Being in Plato's Rhetorical Theory and her book of essays Logos without Rhetoric: The Arts of Language Before Plato. She is also one of the editors of the third edition of The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Her most recent book, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times is written for a general audience and introduces key concepts from the ancient rhetorical tradition that can help readers navigate today's complex and polarizing politics. Ryan Skinnell is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at San José State University. His current research investigates authoritarian, demagogic, and fascist rhetoric, particularly in the early 20th century, and its relationship to global politics in the 21st century. He has published six books, including Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump and Rhetoric and Guns. He's also published more than two dozen articles and book chapters in top scholarly journals and edited collections, as well as essays in popular press outlets including the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon. He is currently writing a book about Adolf Hitler's rhetoric. This episode features a clip from "Truth" by Masteredit. Episode Transcript

No End to the Struggle: An Interview with Derek G. Handley

This episode features an interview with Dr. Derek G. Handley, author of the book Struggle for the City: Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement. Dr. Handley is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is also affiliated faculty in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and in the Urban Studies program. Before that, he was a Chamberlain Project Fellow in English and Black Studies at Amherst College and a Predoctoral Mellon Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. He has taught at Lehigh University, the United States Naval Academy, and the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Currently, he is co-director of the digital humanities project "Mapping Racism and Resistance," which maps racial covenants in Milwaukee County and uncovers Black resistance to such discrimination. In this interview, we discuss his concept of Black rhetorical citizenship, the role of Black women in the civil rights movement in the urban North, the plays of August Wilson, and housing covenants that prevented Black people from purchasing or renting particular properties throughout much of the twentieth century. This episode features a clip from the song "The City" by The Kyoto Connection. Episode Transcript

Sensitivity, Solidarity, and Higher Education: An Interview with Kendall Gerdes

This episode features an interview with Kendall Gerdes. Dr. Gerdes is an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah, where she also serves as president of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors. This interview focuses on her book Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism, which won the Conference on College Composition and Communication's 2025 Outstanding Book Award. In addition to Sensitive Rhetorics, Dr. Gerdes coedited the collection Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies and has published articles in such journals as Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Kairos. The interview addresses the shifting landscape of rhetorical attacks on college students and higher education more broadly, the role of rhetorical theory in addressing those challenges, and the work of writing a book in the midst of a pandemic. This episode features a clip of the song "Down in the Basement" by HoliznaCC0. Episode Transcript

• Transcript

Where the Writing Is: An Interview with Ashley J. Holmes

This episode features an interview with Dr. Ashley Joyce Holmes. Dr. Holmes is Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University, where she leads the Center for Teaching and Learning in supporting effective, innovative, and scholarly teaching that engages students in meaningful learning experiences. She has published books, articles, and chapters in writing studies. One of those books is 2023's Learning on Location, which was also the focus of Dr. Holmes' keynote at the 2024 Peck Research on Writing Symposium, an annual event hosted at Middle Tennessee State University. This interview was recorded during her visit for that symposium. In adding to Learning on Location, Dr. Holmes discusses her coedited collection Learning from the Mess and a 2022 Composition Forum article "Multiple Forms of Representation: Using Maps to Triangulate Students' Tacit Writing Knowledge." This episode includes a clip from Chad Crouch's "Space." Episode Transcript

Rhetorical, Material, Critical Bodies: An Interview With Christina Cedillo

This episode features an interview with Christina Cedillo. Dr. Cedillo is an associate professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, where she recently won the 2024 President's Research Award. Her research lies at the intersections of race, gender, and disability. She examines how legal, scientific, and popular discourses circumscribe the embodied lives of marginalized populations, and how those populations enact rhetorical presence and engage in rehumanization practices using multimodality and digital technologies. In this episode, she discusses a number of her projects. Those include a 2023 special issue of College Composition and Communication focused on cultural rhetorics that Dr. Cedillo coedited, her 2021 Journal of the History of Rhetoric article "Unruly Borders, Bodies, and Blood," a coauthored piece on critical race theory bans in Texas, and an in-process edited collection entitled Rhetorical Approaches to Critical Embodiment. This interview was conducted at the 2024 Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If you are interested in the 2025 Peck Research on Writing Symposium, which is mentioned in the episode's outro, registration is open as of this episode's release. This episode includes a clip from Aldous Ichnite's "Our Entire Bodies Have Always Been the Most Powerful Form of Visual Expression." Episode Transcript

Podcasting in the Classroom: A Roundtable on the Humanities Podcast Network's Teaching Manual

This episode features a roundtable conversation by contributors to Teaching Students to Podcast, an open-access, lesson plan-based manual on integrating podcasts into humanities courses. That manual was written by members of the Humanities Podcast Network's pedagogy working group. The discussion features six of its coauthors: Ulrich Baer, Robin Davies, Eric Detweiler, Emmy Herland, Beth Kramer, and Harly Ramsey. They discuss how they came to podcasting and teaching podcasts, their respective sections of the manual, and the possibilities and challenges of having students make podcasts in courses in and around the humanities. This episode features a clip from Ketsa's "I Hear Echoes." Episode Transcript

"The Path Chose Me": Keith Gilyard on His Career, Writing, and Legacy

This episode features an interview with Dr. Keith Gilyard conducted by guest host Dr. Derek G. Handley during the 2023 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute at Penn State University. They discuss Gilyard's path to a career in rhetoric, writing, and composition studies; his writing process and creative writing; academic mentorship and leadership; and his legacy and contributions to the field of African American rhetoric. Keith Gilyard is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University. He formerly was a member of the faculty at Syracuse University and at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He served as Thomas R. Watson Visiting Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville and as Presidential Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Oklahoma. The author of twenty-four books, his works include the education memoir Voices of the Self (1991), Composition and Cornel West (2008), On African American Rhetoric (with Adam Banks, 2018), biographies of John Oliver Killens (2011) and Louise Thompson Patterson (2017), the novella The Next Great Old-School Conspiracy (2015), and the poetry collections Impressions (2021) and On Location (2023). Gilyard is a former Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English. He is the recipient of two American Book Awards, the CCCC Exemplar Award, the NCTE Distinguished Service Award, and the RSA Cheryl Geisler Award for Outstanding Mentor. This episode features a clip from "Super Glue" by Plushgoolash. Episode Transcript

Food, Feelings, and Other Rhetorical Sensitivities: An Interview with Jennifer LeMesurier

This episode features an interview with Jennifer Lin LeMesurier. The conversation, recorded at this year's Conference on College Composition and Communication, focuses on her 2023 book Inscrutable Eating: Asian Appetites and the Rhetorics of Racial Consumption. That book explores how the rhetorical framing of food and eating underpins our understanding of Asian and Asian American identity in the contemporary racial landscape. Dr. LeMesurier is Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University. Her areas of expertise include bodily and material rhetorics, genre theory, discourse analysis, qualitative research, and affect theory. In addition to Inscrutable Eating, she co-edited Writing in and about the Performing and Visual Arts: Creating, Performing, and Teaching with Steven J. Corbett, Betsy Cooper, and Teagan E. Decker. To date, she has published articles in College Composition and Communication, Peitho, POROI, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. This episode features a clip from "Just a Taste" by Beat Mekanik. Episode Transcript

AI Goes to College: Large Language Models and the Teaching of Writing

This episode of Rhetoricity features members of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on AI and Writing: Antonio Byrd, Holly Hassel, Sarah Z. Johnson, Anna Mills, and Elizabeth Losh. The task force also includes Leonardo Flores, David Green, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and A. Lockett. In July 2023, that task force published a working paper laying out issues, principles, and recommendations related to the effects of generative artificial-intelligence tools on the college writing courses. In this episode's roundtable discussion, these task force members clarify some of the terminology around AI technologies, reflect on the process of writing the working paper, and discuss the pedagogical, historical, and labor implications of large language models for students and teachers working in higher education. This episode is part of The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2023, which runs from August 28–31. The theme of this year's carnival is "Artificial Intelligence: Applications and Trajectories," and it features a keynote by Dr. Isabel Pedersen. Other participating podcasts include 10-Minute Tech Comm; Defend, Publish and Lead; Kairoticast; Live Theory; Neurodissent; Pedagogue; TC Talk; and Writing Remix. Here's a list of some of the materials referenced in this episode: The task force's Quick Start Guide TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies, including Antonio Byrd's chapter "Using LLMs as Peer Reviewers for Revising Essays" Anna Mills's How Arguments Work Black in AI Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence The White House's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights Kathryn Conrad's "A Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education" Hugging Face The Wall Street Journal's "Cleaning Up ChatGPT Takes Heavy Toll on Human Workers" The Washington Post's "Behind the AI Boom, an Army of Overseas Workers in 'Digital Sweatshops'" Memes of the brawl in Montgomery, Alabama This episode features a clip from "Artificial Problems" by Smoked Meat Fax Machine. Episode Transcript

Rhetoricians Assemble: A Roundtable of Black Rhetoric Faculty

This is the third Rhetoricity episode guest-hosted by Dr. Derek Handley. It's also part of The Third Annual Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival. The episode was recorded at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, and marks the two-year anniversary of the protests against anti-Black police violence that took place in the summer of 2020. Moderated by Dr. Handley, it features a roundtable of Black rhetoricians: Tamika Carey, David Green, Andre Johnson, Ersula Ore, and Gwendolyn Pough. They share the paths and choices that led them to become rhetoric scholars, reflect on the limitations of antiracist initiatives in higher education since 2020, and discuss the extra work colleges and universities often demand of Black faculty as well as the ongoing work and importance of supporting Black students and faculty across educational institutions. This episode features clips from the following: "Circle Round" by Spinning Clocks "I'm Going to Go Back There Someday" from The Muppet Movie Episode Transcript

Futures in the Present Tense

Today's episode was originally broadcast as part of The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020, but is finding its way to the Rhetoricity feed in full for the first time. Focus on the carnival's theme of "The Digital Future of Rhetoric and Composition," the episode draws on shows like Adventure Time and Lovecraft Country as well as the present and future realities of the COVID pandemic, racism, and climate change to consider what our disciplinary futures might hold. This episode includes clips and quotations from the following: "Come Along With Me" – Adventure Time The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin "Future Peace" – Uuriter "Future You" – Chad Crouch "Future's Entry" – Lately Kind of Yeah "How Long 'til Black Future Month" – N. K. Jemisin "Our Future" – Sergey Cheremisinov "Simon & Marcy" – Adventure Time "Sundown" – Lovecraft Country Episode Transcript

Crossing Over with Cedric Burrows

This episode features an interview with Cedric Burrows conducted by guest interviewer Derek G. Handley. Their conversation focuses on Dr. Burrows' 2020 book Rhetorical Crossover: The Black Presence in White Culture. Along with many other topics, they discuss his writing process, the music and social movements he takes up in his research, the role of personal stories in theoretical writing and Black intellectual traditions, and how he decided to pursue a career in rhetoric and composition. Dr. Burrows is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Marquette University. In addition to being the author of Rhetorical Crossover, he has published work in an array of scholarly journals and was the winner of Marquette's 2020 Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion Faculty Award. Dr. Derek Handley is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is also affiliate faculty in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. He is currently working on a book project that explores the rhetorical and civic actions taken by African Americans in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 1950s and '60s as they attempted to protect their communities from urban renewal. This episode includes clips from the following: "Milwaukee" by talons' "Leftovers" by Millie Jackson "What a Difference a Day Makes" by Dinah Washington "Big Long Slidin' Thing" by Dinah Washington The Five Heartbeats "Mrs. Huxtable Goes to Kindergarten" The Story of Funk: One Nation Under a Groove Episode Transcript

Demanding Black Linguistic Justice: An Interview with April Baker-Bell

This episode features guest interviewer Derek G. Handley speaking with Dr. April Baker-Bell. They discuss Dr. Baker-Bell's book Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy as well as her work on such projects as the Black Language Syllabus and "This Ain't Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!" Dr. April Baker-Bell is a transdisciplinary teacher-researcher-activist and Associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education in the Department of English and Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. A national leader in conversations on Black Language education, her research interrogates the intersections of Black language and literacies, anti-Black racism, and antiracist pedagogies, and is concerned with antiracist writing, critical media literacies, Black feminist-womanist storytelling, and self-preservation for Black women in academia, with an emphasis on early career Black women. Baker-Bell's award-winning book, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, brings together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism (a term Baker-Bell coined) and white linguistic supremacy. The book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts, and it captures what Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy looks like in community with Black youth. Linguistic Justice features a range of multimodal examples and practices through instructional maps, charts, artwork, and stories that reflect the urgent need for antiracist language pedagogies in our current social and political climate. Baker-Bell is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowship, the 2021 Michigan State University's Community Engagement Scholarship Award and the 2021 Distinguished Partnership Award for Community-Engaged Creative Activity, the 2020 NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, the 2019 Michigan State University Alumni Award for Innovation & Leadership in Teaching and Learning, and the 2018 AERA Language and Social Processes Early Career Scholar Award. Dr. Derek G. Handley is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is also affiliate faculty in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies. He's currently working on a book project that explores the rhetorical and civic actions taken by African Americans in Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 1950s and '60s as they attempted to protect their communities from urban renewal. He is also collaborating on a digital public humanities project with his UW-Milwaukee colleague Anne Bonds entitled "Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County." That project uses GIS mapping and rhetorical analysis of racial housing covenants and African American resistance to them in Milwaukee County. This episode contains a clip from Podington Bear's "Detroit." Episode Transcript

Writing After Writing: An Interview with John Gallagher

This episode features an interview with John R. Gallagher conducted by guest interviewer Sarah Riddick. The interview focuses on Gallagher's 2020 book Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. Gallagher and Riddick discuss the labor and upkeep involved in the digital writing practices of journalists, Amazon reviewers, and redditors, the methods and questions that inform Gallagher's work, and that work's implications for scholarly writing. John Gallagher is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He studies interfaces, digital rhetoric, participatory audiences, and technical communication. He has been published in Computers and Composition, enculturation, Rhetoric Review, Transformations, Technical Communication Quarterly, and Written Communication. In addition to Update Culture, he co-edited a 77-chapter collection with Dànielle Nicole DeVoss titled Explanation Points: Publishing in Rhetoric and Composition. As he mentions in the episode, he's also part of a team working on a National Science Foundation grant entitled "Advancing Adaptation of Writing Pedagogies for Undergraduate STEM Education Through Transdisciplinary Action Research." Sarah Riddick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where she directs the degree-granting Professional Writing program and teaches courses about rhetoric and writing. Her research focuses on the intersections of rhetorical theory, digital rhetoric and cultures, and emergent media. She is currently exploring how social media offers new methodological and pedagogical opportunities for rhetorical studies, with a particular emphasis on how online audience engagement can inform and enhance methodological approaches to rhetorical audience studies and digital rhetorics. This episode features a clip from YACHT's "The Afterlife (Instrumental)." Episode Transcript

Unflattening Global Rhetorics and Archival Pedagogies: An Interview with Tarez Samra Graban

This episode features an interview with Tarez Samra Graban, an associate professor in the Department of English at Florida State University. Dr. Graban was also the keynote speaker at Middle Tennessee State University's annual Peck Research on Writing Symposium in February 2020. This interview was recorded just after that keynote, which was titled "Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Transnational Archive." In this interview, Dr. Graban discusses her work on global and transnational rhetorics, archival methods, and rethinking the role and structure of rhetoric and writing majors at US universities. In particular, we discuss four of her projects. First, Alternative Sources for Rhetorical Traditions, an collection coedited by Graban and Hui Wu. Second, Teaching Rhetoric and Composition through the Archives, another collection Dr. Graban is coediting, this time with Wendy Hayden. Third, her 2017 article "Decolonising the Transnational Archive," which was published in the African Journal of Rhetoric. And finally, a chapter she cowrote with Meghan Velez for the Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, which came out last year. This episode features a clip from Mystery Mammal's "Archives." Episode Transcript

The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020

This is a short episode to make a quick announcement: Over the last week, a bunch of rhetorically inclined podcasts have been putting out new episodes as a part of The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2020. Organized by The Big Rhetorical Podcast's Charles Woods, the carnival's theme was "The Digital Future of Rhetoric and Composition," and its multitudinous episodes will be music to the ears of many Rhetoricity listeners. You can find those episodes via The Big Rhetorical Podcast's Anchor page or Twitter account. In addition to plugging the carnival, this episode features a clip from Rhetoricity's contribution, which is entitled "Futures in the Present Tense" and weaves together reflections on the pandemic, Adventure Time, Afrofuturism, and rhetoric and composition. Episode Transcript

Rhetorical Juxtapositions

This episode of Rhetoricity features contributions from four rhetoric scholars: Kati Fargo Ahern, Ben Harley, Lee Pierce, and Rachel Presley. Their pieces address questions asked by previous guest Damien Smith Pfister: "What juxtapositions in rhetorical studies have you found fruitful, generative, aiding in the process of invention or theorizing, and/or what juxtapositions ought we have? Is there a juxtaposition of two things that we ought to explore but we're not currently exploring?" The contributors respond to Pfister's questions from a variety of angles, touching on memoir, sonic rhetorics, everyday life, visual rhetoric, discriminatory design, cartography, and indigeneity. You can find the photos referenced in Pierce's piece here. This episode features clips from the following songs: "Special Place" by Ketsa "Azimuth approx." and "Finally Falling" by Maps & Transit

Race, Motive, and the Rhetoric of Display: An Interview with Ersula Ore

This episode features an interview with Dr. Ersula J. Ore, recorded at the 2020 Modern Language Association Convention in Seattle, Washington. Dr. Ore is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in the School of Social Transformation and associate professor of African and African American Studies at Arizona State University. Her research explores the suasive strategies of Black Americans as they operate within a post-emancipation historical context, giving particular attention to the ways physical and discursive violence influences performances of citizenship. Dr. Ore received the 2018-2019 Outstanding Mentor award from Arizona State's Center for Global Health, and her book Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity received the 2020 Book Award from the Rhetoric Society of America. Her current research investigates the ways civility discourse masks misogynoir and how such masking reinscribes civility as the racist articulation of a past that expresses the desire for a particular kind of quote-unquote "ordered" present and future. You can check out some of this thinking in her 2019 Organization for Research on Women and Communication keynote entitled "Citizenship, Civility, and the 'Black Looks' of Sandra Bland" as well as "Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatio-Temporal Politics of Breathing," a co-authored piece with Matthew Houdek that is forthcoming this fall in Women's Studies in Communication. In this episode, we discuss Lynching, focusing on the circulation of lynching photographs as a form of epideictic rhetoric, the relation between racism and intention, and experiences that informed Ore's book and her perspective on rhetoric. A heads-up to listeners that this episode includes extensive discussion of anti-Black violence. This episode includes a clip from Daniel Birch's "History Repeats Itself."

Call for Rhetorical Juxtapositions

Note: The deadline for submissions has passed. But please feel free to get in touch if you have ideas for segments and collaborations, whether related to this call or not! This is more of an invitation than a regular episode. I'm interested in hearing listeners' responses to the question posed by Damien Smith Pfister and Michele Kennerly at the end of the previous episode. Here is that question: What juxtapositions in rhetorical studies have you found fruitful, generative, aiding in the process of invention or theorizing, and/or what juxtapositions ought we have? Is there a juxtaposition of two things that we ought to explore but we're not currently exploring? I'll be taking proposals for short audio essays responding to that question through April 3. Listen or read the transcript for more details!

The Available Memes of Persuasion: Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister

Note: Interested in the intersections of rhetoric and sound? The deadline for submissions to the 2020 Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference is Feb. 21! The CFP and submission instructions are available here. This episode features Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, co-editors of the 2018 collection Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks. The interview, recorded at the 2018 Rhetoric Society of America conference, focuses on that collection. Kennerly and Pfister discuss the important distinction between "ancient" and "classical" rhetoric, the challenges and possibilities of linking ancient rhetorics to digital networks, and the rhetorical and civic power of internet memes. Michele Kennerly is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State University. In addition to co-editing Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, she is the author of Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics and co-editor of Information Keywords, which is forthcoming this fall. She is President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric and serves on the Council of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. The interview also features Damien Smith Pfister. He is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, co-editor of Ancient Rhetorics and Digital Networks, and author of the book Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. His next book project is tentatively titled Always On: Fashioning Ethos After Wearable Computing, and he is the newly minted book review editor for the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Along with past guest Casey Boyle, Kennerly and Pfister will be editing a new book series for the University of Alabama Press. Entitled Rhetoric + Digitality, the series will provide a home for the best work emerging at the intersection of rhetorical studies and digital media studies. This episode includes clips from the following: Gustav Holst's "The Planets, Op. 32: IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" "Cicada's orchestra" "Simonides Brings Down the House"