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"

This episode features an interview with Laura Micciche. It was recorded during her visit to Tennessee for the 2019 Peck Research on Writing Symposium. Dr. Micciche was the keynote speaker at the symposium, an annual event hosted by the Department of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Each year, a rhetoric and writing scholar delivers a talk about their research and facilitates a workshop based on that research. This year’s symposium will take place on February 28, and will also host the annual meeting of MidSouth WPA, an affiliate of the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

Laura Micciche is a professor in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on writing pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and writing program administration, and she’s the author of the books Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching and Acknowledging Writing Partners. The latter is available as an open-access book through WAC Clearinghouse. Dr. Micciche has also written copious articles, including a recent coauthored piece for College English entitled “Editing as Inclusion Activism,” a College Composition and Communication article entitled “Toward Graduate-Level Writing Instruction,” and an article in the journal WPA entitled “For Slow Agency.” She recently completed a six-year tenure as editor of the journal Composition Studies. Her current research is on the mundane aspects of academic writing, which she focused on in her presentation at MTSU.

In this interview, Micciche discusses Acknowledging Writing Partners, the concept of slowness in relation to teaching and WPA work, the importance of methodological inclusiveness, and her interest in the mundane, including the nonhuman animals and objects that populate the places where academics write.

This episode features a clip of the song "Special Place" by Ketsa.

For more information on the Rhetoric Society of America's Andrea A. Lunsford Diversity Fund, which is discussed in the introduction to this episode, click here.

This episode of Rhetoricity features an interview with Andrea Lunsford, interviewed by Ben Harley as part of the Rhetoric Society of America Oral History Initiative. Over the past year and a half, Rhetoricity host and producer Eric Detweiler has been coordinating that initiative. At its 2018 conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) celebrated its 50th anniversary. As a part of that celebration, the organization sponsored the Oral History Initiative, which recorded interviews with 25 of RSA’s long-time members and leaders. In those interviews, they discuss their involvement in key moments in the organization’s history, the broader history of rhetoric as a discipline, and their expectations and hopes for the field’s future.

Since then, Eric has been working with Elizabeth McGhee Williams, a doctoral student at Middle Tennessee State University, to transcribe and create a digital archive of those interviews. The two of them wrote an article about the materials that just came out in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. And the archive of the interviews and transcripts themselves is now available for you to peruse.

To help promote that project, this episode features Lunsford's interview from the RSA Oral History Initiative.

Dr. Lunsford is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English, Emerita, at Stanford University. She was the Director of Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric from 2000 to 2013 and the founder of Stanford’s Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. Dr. Lunsford also developed undergraduate and graduate writing programs at the University of British Columbia and at The Ohio State University, where she founded The Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing. She’s designed and taught courses in writing history and theory, feminist rhetorics, literacy studies, and women’s writing and is the editor, author, or co-author of 23 books. Those books include Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse; Singular Texts/Plural Authors; Reclaiming Rhetorica; Everything’s an Argument; The Everyday Writer; and Everyone’s an Author. She’s won awards including the Modern Language Association’s Mina Shaughnessy Prize, the Conference on College Composition and Communication award for best article, which she's won twice, and the CCCC Exemplar Award.  A long-time member of the Bread Loaf School of English faculty, she is currently co-editing The Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing and working on a new textbook called Let’s Talk.

Ben Harley, her interviewer, is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication Studies at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. His classes provide students with high-impact writing situations that let them compose useful and interesting texts for their own communities, and his research focuses on pedagogy, sound, and the ways that everyday texts impact the public sphere. He’s published work in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Present Tense, and Hybrid Pedagogy.

The transition music after this episode's introduction is "Creative Writing" by Chad Crouch.

Edit (08/07/2019): The CFP for the 2020 Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference is now live! Check it out here.

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Just in time for the 2019 Computers and Writing Conference, this Rhetoricity episode features . . . an audio recording of Eric Detweiler's 2016 Computers and Writing presentation. A majorly revised reiteration of this presentation came out last year in volume 5 of Textshop Experiments.

In short, this episode/presentation makes the case for embracing weirder conventions in academic podcasting, drawing on the popular podcast Welcome to Night Vale as a model. Because the episode is a recording of a presentation, it's more monologic than the interview-centered episodes of this podcast. But it does come with circus music, sound effects, a parodic advertisement, traffic update, and weather report, so give it a listen if you're up for a slightly odd episode.

Finally, this episode is also a chance to announce two other sound-related happenings in rhetoric and writing studies. First, the official launch of the new sonic projects section in enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture. The first two pieces in that section were just published as part of the journal's 28th issue. Second, the Sound Studies, Rhetoric, and Writing Conference in Detroit, Michigan. That conference will happen from October 1-3, 2020, and builds on last year's Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing. The CFP should be available in the next week or two, and this blurb will be updated with a link to that CFP once it's ready.

This episode uses the following sound clips:

• "8 Bit Circus Music"
• "Submarine Diving Sound"
• "Breaker-1"
• "The University of What It Is"

This episode features an interview with Dr. Ryan Skinnell, assistant professor at San José State University and editor of the recent collection Faking the News: What Rhetoric Can Teach Us About Donald J. Trump. That collection is the focal point of the episode.

This interview was recorded at the 2018 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Because Faking the News is meant to speak to audiences beyond academia, we tried to approach the interview in a way that would be accessible for those who don't have advanced degrees in rhetoric and writing. We discuss what exactly rhetoric and demagoguery are, what sets rhetoric scholars apart from other academic experts, and strategies for maintaining momentum on writing projects. Oh, and pajama pants.

In addition to editing Faking the News, Skinnell is the author of the book Conceding Composition: A Crooked History of Composition's Institutional Fortunes, coeditor of a forthcoming collection called Reinventing (with) Theory in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, and an editor for the website Citizen Critics, which brings rhetoric scholarship to bear on the news of the day for a mainstream audience. He’s also currently researching and writing about rhetoric and guns and fascist rhetoric. And last but not least, he’s editing a forthcoming special issue of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly entitled “Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric.”

This episode features a clip of the song "Grifted" by Literature.

This episode features Dr. Christine Tulley. Dr. Tulley was the invited speaker at the 2018 Peck Research on Writing Symposium, an annual event hosted by Middle Tennessee State University's Department of English. Each year, the symposium features a rhetoric and writing scholar who gives a keynote talk on their research, then facilitates a workshop based on the classroom applications of that research.

This interview was recorded the day before Dr. Tulley's talk, which focused on the findings of her recent book, How Writing Faculty Write: Strategies for Process, Product, and Productivity. That book features interviews with fifteen prolific and well-established rhetoric and writing scholars, focusing on how they develop ideas, conduct research, draft, revise, and pursue publication.

In addition to writing How Writing Faculty Write, Christine Tulley is the founder and director of the MA in Rhetoric and Writing and Professor of English at the University of Findlay. Her current research focuses on faculty writing within rhetoric and composition, and she partners with Prolifiko, a UK-based research group that studies academic productivity. She has a forthcoming book project entitled "Rhet/Comp Moms: Parenting, Publication, and Professionalism," which we also discuss in the episode.

In addition, we talk about Dr. Tulley’s own writing process, what led her to study how writing faculty write, her writing advice for graduate students and junior faculty, and how learning to play guitar has changed the way she composes. Oh, and Lunchables.

This episode features clips from the following songs:

• "Adventure, Darling" by Gillicuddy
• "Thought Soup" by Doctor Turtle

This is the final episode in Rhetoricity's "Dissertation Dialogues" series, which features conversations between PhD students at Indiana University and some of their dissertation directors and committee members. This particular episode features Collin Bjork and Dr. John Schilb.

Collin Bjork is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at IU. His dissertation develops a theoretical framework for better understanding how rhetoric functions over time. His article “Integrating Usability Testing and Digital Rhetoric in Online Writing Instruction” just came out in a special issue of Computers and Composition. He has taught courses in sonic rhetoric, visual rhetoric, service-learning writing, online composition, multilingual composition, and cross-cultural composition. Collin has also worked as an online instructional designer and as a program assistant for multilingual composition. As a Fulbright English teaching assistant, he taught at the University of Montenegro in Podgorica.

John Schilb is Culbertson Chair of Writing and Professor of English at IU. While at IU, has also served as editor of the journal College English, director of first-year composition, and director of writing and rhetorical studies. He teaches writing, literature, rhetoric, and film. Before coming to Indiana, he taught at Carthage College, Denison University, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the University of Maryland. From 1984 to 1990, he was vice president of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a Chicago-based consortium of liberal arts colleges. His book Rhetorical Refusals: Defying Audiences’ Expectations won the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. He is also author of Between the Lines: Relating Composition Theory and Literary Theory and coeditor of four volumes: Making Literature Matter, Arguing About Literature, Writing Theory and Critical Theory, and Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. In addition, he has published many articles and contributed chapters to several collections. His current book project is a study of nuance as rhetoric. He has a short piece on that topic that just came out in a symposium on virtue ethics in Rhetoric Review.

In this episode, the pair discusses John Schilb’s past and present work between the lines of academic disciplines, his time as the editor of College English, and his current work on nuance as a rhetorical virtue. They also talk about inductive approaches to developing scholarly projects as well as Indiana University’s recently created rhetoric program.

This episode features a clip from the song "Lines" by Glass Boy.

This is the second episode in a late-summer series: the Dissertation Dialogues. These episodes feature conversations between PhD candidates from Indiana University and some of their dissertation mentors. For more context, check out Vol. 1.

This particular episode features Jennifer Juszkiewicz and Dana Anderson. Jennifer Juszkiewicz is a PhD candidate at IU who studies composition theory and rhetorics of space and place. Her dissertation focuses on simultaneously digital and material locations where writing happens. She'll be defending that dissertation in the coming academic year, during which she'll also be joining the faculty at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, to serve as writing center director and assistant writing program coordinator.

Dana Anderson is an associate professor at IU and also serves as Director of Composition. He received his PhD from Penn State, published his book Identity's Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion in 2007, and coedited the 2013 collection Burke in the Archives: Using the Past to Transform the Future of Burkean Studies with Jessica Enoch. His coauthored article "Screaming on a Ride to Nowhere: What Roller Coasters Teach Us About Being Human" was recently published in the journal Entertainment Values.

Among other things, Juszkiewicz and Anderson discuss the role of the rhetorical tradition in contemporary rhetoric and writing instruction, strategies for training new writing instructors, and the continuing relevance of Maurice Charland's 1987 article "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the peuple quebecois."

Ryan Juszkiewicz contributed extensive editorial work to this episode. The episode features clips from the following:

• "Roller Coaster Screams" by InspectorJ
• "Supermoon" by Ikebe Shakedown

This is the first in a series of special late-summer episodes of Rhetoricity. At the 2017 Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute, some graduate students at Indiana University helped coordinate and conduct interviews with scholars who attended that institute. Those students also pitched another idea: a series of conversations between PhD candidates and their dissertation advisors. This episode features the first of those conversations. My hope is that these episodes, which are more akin to dialogues than interviews, will not only give listeners a sense of the interlocutors' research interests, but provide a window into the advisee-advisor relationship. To that end, I encouraged participants to take some time to discuss academic mentorship.

This episode features a conversation between Caddie Alford and Scot Barnett. Scot Barnett is an associate professor in the Department of English at IU. He's the author of the book Rhetorical Realism: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Ontology of Things and coeditor of the collection Rhetoric, Through Everyday Things. Caddie Alford, who was a PhD candidate at the time this episode was recorded, has since accepted a position as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of "Creating with the 'Universe of the Undiscussed': Hashtags, Doxa, and Choric Invention" and has an article in a forthcoming special issue of Rhetoric Review on the topic of virtue ethics.

In their conversation, Alford and Barnett discuss their interests in rhetoric and embodiment, the ways digital technologies speak to and shift longstanding rhetorical concepts, and how they approach the advisor-advisee relationship.

This episode includes clips from the following:

• "Introducing the co-writer" by Machine, Dear
• "Messa di Voce (Performance version, 2003)"
• Noah

This episode features two interviewees: Dr. Jonathan Alexander and Dr. Jackie Rhodes. Rhodes and Alexander are not only prolific writers and media makers, but prolific collaborators. Together, they’ve edited The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric as well as Sexual Rhetorics: Methods, Publics, Identities. In this episode, we discuss two of their other collaborative projects: On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies and Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self. Techne won the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship. 

Beyond their co-creations, Jonathan Alexander is the Chancellor’s Professor of English and Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He’s also the current editor of the journal College Composition and Communication and the author of the critical memoir Creep: A Life, A Theory, An Apology, which is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and being turned into a podcast.

Jackie Rhodes is a professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University and the incoming editor of the journal Rhetoric Society Quarterly. She’s also currently working on a documentary called Once a Fury, which is about a 1970s lesbian separatist group called the Furies.

The following interview was recorded at the 2017 Conference on College Composition and Communication in a defunct alcove that was once full of pay phones. In addition to Techne and On Multimodality, Drs. Rhodes and Alexander discuss the creepiness of academic disciplines, why it’s important to understand the history of media forms, and the personal, narrative, and scholarly possibilities of digital publications.

This episode includes clips from Techne and Tony Zhou's "How to Structure a Video Essay" as well as various sound effects from freesound.org.