Events

Join us in the Grucci Room to celebrate this year's graduate student award winner! A presentation of his work will be followed by a question-and-answer session. Light refreshments will be provided beginning at 3pm.

Michael Young, winner of the 2023 CALS Summer Graduate Fellowship

Presentation Title: "'Short-circuiting Reality': L. Ron Hubbard, Kenneth Burke, and the Homuncular Rhetorical Situation"

Michael Young is a doctoral candidate in the department of English. He studies the history of rhetorical education within a cultural studies framework, investigating how popular speech and writing pedagogies mold political subjects and structure the field of social action. His dissertation, "Twentieth Century Sophistries: Popular Science, Human Manuals, and American Rhetorical Education," traces the history of a shadow rhetorical tradition that developed alongside the academic disciplines of English and Communication. This tradition—which animates a wide range of educational institutes, self-help literature, religious movements, and pyramid schemes—is both a constitutive element of American rhetorical education and an understudied agent of political life.