Education 

PhD, Penn State University, 2002

Areas of Specialization 

   • Modern Rhetorical Theory
   • History of Rhetoric
   • Rhetoric of Science

Current Research Projects 

Invention and the Future: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Forthcoming from SUNY Press)

This book begins with the claim that some of the most crucial implications of postmodern theory have gone largely unnoticed, and that it may be that only now, amidst the alleged end of theory and overcoming of postmodernism that this other postmodern challenge might begin to be heard. This other challenge concerns "the problem of change" and calls us to rethink the very movement of transformation that engineers so much contemporary scholarship. Drawing on the philosophical projects of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, the book turns to a series of concepts and practices associated with the classical tradition of rhetorical invention. Through close readings of key rhetorical texts by Aristotle, Plato, the Sophists, and others, the book attempts to both discuss and to demonstrate how rhetorical invention can offer a non-dialectical or "affirmative" sense of change.