I chose Rhetoric as my academic area. Unfortunately, many with limited exposure to rhetoric only associate it with college freshman composition or introductory speech classes, and they limit rhetoric either to a simple study of style or to linguistic ornamentation.

Rhetoric–especially in Italian Humanist thought–serves as the starting point for all dialectic, for only through rhetoric do we use metaphors to describe first thoughts. I recommend a book by Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition, for further information on this topic.

My focus in Rhetoric tends towards the Rhetoric of Religion and especially the Rhetoric of Gender in Religion. Check back soon for a paper I recently wrote on women in churches of Christ. I will present papers in March 2005 at the American Comparative Literature Association meeting at Penn State and at the PCA/ACA National Conference in San Diego, CA.