Race, Motive, and the Rhetoric of Display: An Interview with Ersula Ore
Release Date: 06/29/2020
Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth: Afterwords
Rhetoricity
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 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...
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This episode features an interview with , author of the book . 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...
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Sensitivity, Solidarity, and Higher Education: An Interview with Kendall Gerdes
Rhetoricity
This episode features an interview with . 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 , which won the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s 2025 Outstanding Book Award. In addition to Sensitive Rhetorics, Dr. Gerdes coedited the collection and has published articles in such journals as Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Kairos. The...
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Where the Writing Is: An Interview with Ashley J. Holmes
Rhetoricity
This episode features an interview with . 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 , which was also the focus of Dr. Holmes' keynote at the 2024 , an annual event hosted at Middle Tennessee State University. This interview was recorded during her visit for that symposium. In adding...
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Rhetorical, Material, Critical Bodies: An Interview With Christina Cedillo
Rhetoricity
This episode features an interview with . 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 focused on...
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Podcasting in the Classroom: A Roundtable on the Humanities Podcast Network’s Teaching Manual
Rhetoricity
This episode features a roundtable conversation by contributors to , an open-access, lesson plan-based manual on integrating podcasts into humanities courses. That manual was written by members of the 's pedagogy working group. The discussion features six of its coauthors: , , , , , and . 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
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"The Path Chose Me": Keith Gilyard on His Career, Writing, and Legacy
Rhetoricity
This episode features an interview with conducted by guest host 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...
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Food, Feelings, and Other Rhetorical Sensitivities: An Interview with Jennifer LeMesurier
Rhetoricity
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AI Goes to College: Large Language Models and the Teaching of Writing
Rhetoricity
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Rhetoricians Assemble: A Roundtable of Black Rhetoric Faculty
Rhetoricity
This is the third Rhetoricity episode guest-hosted by . It's also part of . The episode was recorded at the 2022 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: , , , , and . 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...
info_outlineThis 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."