Recently completed dissertations
Zachary Dobbins
Jan Fernheimer
"The Rhetoric of Black Jewish Identity Construction in America and Israel: 1964-1972."
Analyzing primary materials uncovered at the Schomburg Center and interviews conducted in Harlem and Israel, I rhetorically analyze flashpoints of conflict over claims to black Jewish identity and argue that rhetorical theory provides means for better understanding, but not resolving conflicts when identity is precisely the issue at stake.
Lena Khor
"Human Rights Discourses on a Global Network: Network Acts and Actors from Humanitarian NGOs, Conflict Sites, and the Fiction Market"
This project reconsiders the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of the globalization of human rights by attending to the discursive (and thus changeable and changing) nature of human rights language and ideology, and the networked system in which it traffics. By modeling a global discourse network, I examine how as the discourse of human rights circulate worldwide, it might be affected by and be affecting its subjects, especially their individual identity and agency.
Sara Sliter-Hays
"Narratives and Rhetoric: Persuasion in Doctors’ Writings about the Summer Complaint, 1883-1939"
My dissertation focuses on the suasive use and evolution of narratives in medical discourse from 1883 to 1939. Using rhetorical principles and an interdisciplinary approach, I argue that narratives used in doctors’ writing negotiate professional boundaries between medical, technical, scientific, pedagogical, professional, and social forces, changing them while at the same time evolving in response to these forces. The dissertation’s first chapter discusses how scientific and biotechnical innovations impacted medicine. It also considers the social and historical factors that led to an emphasis on the professionalization and “scientification” of doctors and the practice and discourse of medicine. The second chapter argues that doctors’ knowledge about a disease, its diagnosis, and its treatment evolved with improving technology, while case narratives presented an opportunity for professional dialogue to continue despite the seemingly decisive diagnoses offered by new technology. Chapters three and four uncover implicit causal narratives in explanations of childhood disease and death, how scientific and social changes transformed these causal narratives, and the social and political implications of these discursive transformations. The fifth chapter considers doctors’ stories about encounters with patients who are not sick but physically deformed, narratives which appear to be about science but work at deeper levels to challenge or reinforce professional identity.
Dissertations to be completed 2008-09
Erin Boade
"The Limits of Civility in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements: Four African-American Women's Autobiographies"
Rhetoricians have long praised argumentation as a productive alternative to violence, and while I agree that it can be such an alternative, my dissertation aims to enter this conversation in order to complicate our understanding of violence and coercion. My dissertation makes two main arguments, 1) that the dominant narrative of the civil rights (CRM) and Black Power movements (BPM) has been insufficiently challenged by rhetoricians, and 2) that this lack can be explained in part by these scholars' preference for civility and decorum over coercion in persuasion. I argue that both the CRM and BPM actually share similarities in both tactics and philosophies, and looking beyond assessing these movements in terms of their alleged levels of civility allows us more fully to account for the complexity of their rhetorical situations.
Rodney Herring
"Manners of Speaking: Linguistic Capital, Composition Pedagogy, and Cultural Production, 1870-1900"
This dissertation concerns a moment of intense anxiety about Standard English, the late nineteenth century in the United States, when popular, scholarly, and literary writers worried over the possibility that people with social pretensions could, by manipulating their language, masquerade as something they weren’t—that is, pass for a new and better class. Many of these writers found ways to dismiss such people by judging them to have bad grammar. Commentary on grammar, however, had paradoxical consequences: on the one hand, arguments for grammatical correctness revealed the secrets of speaking well to the emerging middle-class readers from whom such secrets were meant to distinguish the elite; on the other hand, texts supporting the tolerance of linguistic pluralism eventually informed the attitude elite readers used to distinguish themselves from the intolerant middle class. “Manners of Speaking” argues for seeking the grounds of this paradox—or more accurately, double paradox—in social contradictions, such as the requirement that some people have “bad grammar” if others are to possess distinguished manners of speaking.
Dissertations to be completed 2009-10
Nathan Kreuter
Working Title: "Rhetorical Intelligence: Understanding the US Intelligence Community as a Discourse Community and Knowledge-Building Discipline"
This dissertation explores how the US Intelligence Community operates rhetorically. Drawing on the examples generated by recent, catastrophic failures in the IC, the dissertation focuses on the IC's attitudes towards language, politics, epistemology and the sciences in its attempt to explain the knowledge-building practices that have led to 9/11 and the misguided war in Iraq. While the Intelligence Community claims to be both a-political and even a-rhetorical in its own discourse, the dissertation does not accept those claims, but does use them as a starting point from which to understand the IC's knowledge-building practices and how they might be improved.
Amanda Moulder