Thomas Rickert

About

Thomas J. Rickert is a Professor of English at Purdue University, with additional affiliations in Religious Studies, SIS, Philosophy, and Literature. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2000. His research interests focus on histories and theories of rhetoric, particularly concerning the sophists, comparative rhetoric, ecology, and post-phenomenological approaches to media and technology. Rickert has published works including 'Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject' (2007) and 'Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being' (2013), both through Pittsburgh University Press. His essays have appeared in journals such as Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Review of Communication, and Rhetorica. Recent work explores the relationship between rhetoric and media and technology in both Ancient Greece and the contemporary world. His current book project investigates how the sophists anticipated and addressed challenges brought on by digitality.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Business
• Art
• Linguistics
• Literature

Selected publications

• Forum: Bruno Latour on Rhetoric

  Rhetoric Society Quarterly · 2017-10-20 · 23 citations

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  It used to be that only rhetoricians of science and technology read Bruno Latour. However, Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers’s 2015 collection Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition d...

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• Rhetorical New Materialisms (RNM)

  Rhetoric Society Quarterly · 2022 · 22 citations

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• In the House of Doing: Rhetoric and the Kairos of Ambience

  2016-01-01 · 11 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In the opening to the seventh chapter of The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, C. writes, I, C. Taylor, am not writing this book (196). This seems counterintuitive. I have the book; his name is listed as the author; some agent with the designation Mark C. Taylor at some time put words to page or screen. Is this not an author? Well, perhaps not. Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes have suggested that the author is but a discursive fiction, a mere function of discourse if not actually…

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• Ambient Engineering: Hyper-Nudging, Hyper-Relevance, and Rhetorics of Nearness and Farness in a Post-AI Algorithmic World

  Rhetoric Society Quarterly · 2024-10-19 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• It Is All There: From Reason to Reasoning-in-the-World

  Philosophy and Rhetoric · 2019-04-01 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The emergence of narratives concerning post-truth, alternative facts, fake news, and the like underpins a felt sense of crisis about the possibility of debate, insofar as argument depends on truth norms. This essay argues that the post-truth narrative is regressive. It depends on Enlightenment-derived standards of truth that were from the beginning impoverished. I argue that rather than appeal nostalgically to the past, we should look to arguments interior to rhetorical history that poi…

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Frequent coauthors

• Diane Davis

  The University of Texas at Austin

  1528 shared

• Leah Ceccarelli

  University of Cincinnati

  1528 shared

• Michael Bernard‐Donals

  Loyola Marymount University

  1527 shared

• Steven Mailloux

  Loyola Marymount University

  1527 shared

• Kendall R. Phillips

  Hope College

  798 shared

• Nathaniel A. Rivers

  570 shared

• Michael Weiser

  Drexel University

  568 shared

• Chris Mays

  568 shared

Awards & honors

• Alumni Awards

Similar researchers at Purdue University

• Michael Johnstonh-53
• Robert Paul Lambh-36
• Arkady Plotnitskyh-20