Jodie Nicotra
College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences
Department of English
Associate Professor, Director of Writing
Home Town:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
With UI Since 2005
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Ph.D., M.A., The Pennsylvania State University, English: Rhetoric and Composition, 2005
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B.A., B.S., The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, English Literature/Biology, 1995
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Rhetoric and Composition, with emphasis on the rhetoric of science and technology
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Material rhetorics
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New media
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Rhetorical theory
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Critical theory
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- “The Anaesthetic Revelation of Kenneth Burke.” Invited chapter for Burke in the Archives. Discusses how Kenneth Burke’s career-long interest in mysticism changed and developed over time.
- “Making a Habit of Success: Disciplinary Rhetorics and the New Economy.” Currently under review at Postmodern Culture. Looks at how habit-based self-help books like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People “discipline” readers into being more flexible and efficient producers.
- “Rushing the Cure: Temporal Rhetorics in Global Warming Discourse.” Accepted at JAC: Rhetoric, Writing, Culture, Politics. Looks at the critical role of time (what the article calls “chronotopes”) in newspaper reporting on global climate change. Co-written with Judith Totman Parrish.
- “Dancing Attitudes in Wartime: Kenneth Burke and General Semantics.” Accepted at Rhetoric Society Quarterly, June 2009. Using the work of Kenneth Burke and Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, traces out the effects of differing attitudes toward language in World War II America.
- "'Folksonomy' and the Restructuring of Writing Space." College Composition and Communication 61:1 (2009): 233-250. Talks about the need to adopt and teach different metaphors for writing, using “folksonomy” or multi-user tagging as an example.
- "The Seduction of Samuel Butler: Rhetorical Agency and the Art of Response." Rhetoric Review 27:1 (2008), 38-53. Uses the ideas of fascination and seduction (as seen in Samuel Butler’s reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species) as the basis for a new form of reading.
- "William James in the Borderlands: Psychedelic Science and the 'Accidental Fences' of Self." Configurations 16:2 (Winter 2010). Talks about William James’s self-experiments with nitrous oxide as a way to think about responding to habit.
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- Jodie gives workshops and presentations on writing in the workplace,
incorporating writing in undergraduate courses, teaching writing to
graduate students, and science in the media.