| Research Narrative |
My research is focused on rhetorics of the Cold War. Lasting nearly one-fifth of the nation's history, the Cold War represents the rise of American world supremacy, the crucible of powerful American ideologies, and the context in which the United States assumed the power to destroy the world via nuclear weapons. For all these reasons and more, the Cold War has epochal significance in American and world histories. My research combines the theoretical and conceptual resources of ancient and contemporary rhetorical studies with those of philosophy to explore the constitutive role of rhetoric in the United States during the Cold War. Specifically, I am concerned with “epideictic” dimensions of discourse, what discourse “shows forth” about collective self-understandings. Starting with this particular view of rhetoric, my work accounts for the ways in which discourses of the Cold War have older rhetorical histories. What, I ask, can we learn about America and America 's Cold War by considering the intellectual, cultural, political, and rhetorical traditions that Cold War rhetoric invoked and furthered? To address this question I work from the theories of epideictic rhetoric and “civic sight” I have built to consider how language interacts with worldview and identity to shape the interpretations of political actors and their actions within the world. Presently, I am finishing a study of American Cold War security strategy in the first decade of the conflict entitled Spirits of the Cold War. In that work, I look at the language of major cultural, ethical, and religious traditions within discourse about Cold War strategy: the language of Stoicism within discourse about "containment," the language of Romanticism within discourse about nuclear deterrence, the language of Puritan Protestantism within discourse about "massive retaliation," and finally the language of economic adventurism within the strategic discourse about "liberation." Such languages, I argue, communicate the underlying worldviews of American security strategies. Meanwhile I am working on a second book project, Catastrophic Vistas: The Aesthetics of Order in Superpower America, which is concerned with representations of order and disorder in Cold War America (and beyond)--for example, representations of "technology" as a means and form of social order. Thirdly, I am working with my colleague Kevin Hamilton (Art & Design, University of Illinois) on a short history of the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station in Hollywood, which produced classified motion picture and still photographs for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission from 1947-1969. All in all, my work is aimed at not merely at mapping and comprehending the Cold War, but of making rhetorical, moral, and political sense of the worlds that made the Cold War, and the worlds the Cold War made.
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