Collectively, their work tests theory and complements criticism while standing as a distinct and valid approach in and of itself.

The History and Theory of Rhetoric offers discussion of the history of rhetorical studies in the Western tradition, from ancient Greece to contemporary American and European theorists that is easily accessible to students. By tracing the historical progression of rhetoric from the Greek Sophists of the 5th Century B.C. all the way to contemporary studies–such as the rhetoric of science and feminist rhetoric–this comprehensive text helps students understand how persuasive public discourse performs essential social functions and shapes our daily worlds. Students gain conceptual framework for evaluating and practicing persuasive writing and speaking in a wide range of settings and in both written and visual media. Known for its clear writing style and contemporary examples throughout, The History and Theory of Rhetoric emphasizes the relevance of rhetoric to today's students.

American Lobotomy studies a wide variety of representations of lobotomy to offer a rhetorical history of one of the most infamous procedures in the history of medicine. The development of lobotomy in 1935 was heralded as a “miracle cure” that would empty the nation’s perennially blighted asylums. However, only twenty years later, lobotomists initially praised for their “therapeutic courage” were condemned for their barbarity, an image that has only soured in subsequent decades. Johnson employs previously abandoned texts like science fiction, horror film, political polemics, and conspiracy theory to show how lobotomy’s entanglement with social and political narratives contributed to a powerful image of the operation that persists to this day. The book provocatively challenges the history of medicine, arguing that rhetorical history is crucial to understanding medical history. It offers a case study of how medicine accumulates meaning as it circulates in public culture and argues for the need to understand biomedicine as a culturally situated practice.

Examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women's health.

"Collection of essays that reassesses history as rhetoric and rhetorical history as practice "--

Untimely Women recovers the work of three early-twentieth-century working women, none of whom history has understood as feminists or rhetors: cinema icon and memoirist, Mae West; silent film screenwriter and novelist, Anita Loos; and journalist and mega-publisher, Marcet Haldeman-Julius. While contemporary scholarship tends to highlight and recover women who most resemble academic feminists in their uses of propositional rhetoric, Jason Barrett-Fox uses what he terms a medio-materialist historiography to emphasize the different kinds of political and ontological gender-power that emerged from the inscriptional strategies these women employed to navigate and critique male gatekeepers--from movie stars to directors to editors to abusive husbands. In recasting the work of West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius in this way, Barrett-Fox reveals the material and ontological ramifications of their forms of invention, particularly their ability to tell trauma in ways that reach beyond their time to raise the consciousness of audiences unavailable to them in their lifetimes. Untimely Women thus accomplishes important historical and rhetorical work that not only brings together feminist historiography, rhetorical materialism, and posthumanism but also redefines what counts as feminist rhetoric.

Mapping the organizational identity (OI) field -- Critical perspectives on OI -- Integrative models of OI -- How individuals relate to OI -- Sources and processes of OI -- OI and the environment -- Implications of OI