Samuel McCormick

Assistant Professor Office: BRNG 2264
Office Phone: (765) 494-3302
Email: smccorm@purdue.edu

Research and Teaching

Professor McCormick is interested in communication and social theory, the rhetoric of everyday life, ideologies of the aesthetic, and methodological intersections between intellectual and cultural historiography.  He is currently finishing a book-length study of the minor political rhetoric of several major Western thinkers—Seneca the Younger, Christine de Pizan, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard.  Sam was recently awarded the Pamela J. Cooper Teaching Award, the Douglas H. Ehninger Teaching Award, and the Donald C. Bryant Rhetorical Studies Award.

Representative Publications

• “The Political Identity of the Philosopher: Resistance, Relative Power, and the Endurance of Potential.”  Philosophy and Rhetoric 42 (2009): 72-91.
• “Mirrors For the Queen: A Letter from Christine de Pizan on the Eve of Civil War.”  Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 273-296.
• “Hermeneutics.”  The International Encyclopedia of Communication.  Ed. Wolfgang Donsbach (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 2111-2115.  (Co-authored with John Durham Peters)
• “The Artistry of Obedience: From Kant to Kingship.”  Philosophy & Rhetoric 38 (2005): 302-327.
• “Earning One’s Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of
  Public Discourse.”  The Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 109-131.