Carl Herndl

From USF English Faculty Website:

My PhD is from the University of Minnesota, and over the last twenty-five years I have taught at North Carolina State University, New Mexico State University, and Iowa State University, with a brief stint as visiting faculty at the University of Vermont, where my spouse, Dr. Diane Price Herndl, was teaching at the time. Diane is also a Professor in English and Women’s Studies at USF, and we have spent our careers collaborating and exchanging ideas across the subdisciplines of literary studies, rhetorical studies, and Women's Studies. While I read theory in all three subdisciplines, my primary areas of expertise are rhetorical and critical theory and the rhetoric of science. Within those two rather large areas, I am most interested in issues of social change and the role of rhetoric in environmental science and policy. When I am lucky, these two issues coincide in my work. Many of the complex environmental and ecological problems we face today require both scientific research and social and political change. Neither is adequate without the other. Rhetorical theory and practice lie at the heart of both.

When I arrived at Iowa State in 2001, I created the program’s first course in the rhetoric of science, and I quickly discovered that in the Midwest, sustainable agriculture and agroecosystem management were important scientific and social problems. And I decided that if I was going to continue writing about the rhetoric of science, I might actually do some science. That led to my being a member of a number of interdisciplinary research teams in sustainable agriculture and agroecosystem management and to my co-authoring articles in science journals. So I have co-authored articles on nitrogen dynamics in soils and their affect on water quality, on sustainable biofuel systems, on rapid assessment of technology and on the discourse of sustainability in one rural agricultural community.

I haven’t, of course, become a scientist. I continue to write about scientific discourse and rhetorical theory in rhetoric journals. My colleague Scott Graham and I have just published an article in Rhetoric Society Quarterly on how stasis theory might provide a mechanism for the transformation of Foucault’s discursive formations and another piece in Technical Communication Quarterly on multiple ontology theory and postplural science studies. I am currently working on a number of projects in rhetoric of science: an edited collection that my coeditors and I hope will define the future direction of the subdiscipline, a textbook on sustainability and resilience for Oxford University Press titled The Green Reader, the connections between rhetorical theory and object-oriented ontology and postplural science studies, and Bruno Latour’s relationship to materialist theory.

Since coming to USF, I have become a faculty member of the Patel Center for Global Sustainability. This is a dynamic group of researchers and scholars who work with institutions around the world on issues of sustainability and urban resilience, especially as it relates to water. This is Florida after all. As part of this group, I am Co-PI on large research proposals for integrating science, technology, policy, and citizen engagement aimed at developing technology and policy necessary for sustainable urban forms. his kind of interdisciplinary work is important for a number of reasons. First, the knowledge/power formation that is science is one of the most powerful discourses in our culture. Understanding how it operates from the inside is essential. Second, if Cultural Studies takes up the everyday by taking a “detour through theory” as Larry Grossberg says, I think rhetorical theory should always take a detour through engaged practice. Problems of resilience and sustainability offer fecund opportunities for developing rhetorical theory and praxis. Finally, as a number of critics in Rhetoric and Science Studies have argued, e.g., Latour, Simons, Collins and Evans, the work of critique, while valuable, is not enough. Engaged scholars have an opportunity to cooperate with their colleagues in the sciences as they manage the uncertainty of complex and non-linear systems and a tortured policy atmosphere. This is compelling work, and it offers wonderful research opportunities for both faculty and graduate students.

As director of the graduate program in rhetoric and composition I am working to enrich the curricular opportunities available to our students. USF is a big, comprehensive university with a great deal of intellectual talent. There are colleagues in Women and Gender Studies, Philosophy, Sociology, Communications Studies, Environmental Science, and the Patel School for Global Sustainability whose research intersects Rhetoric in important ways. I am always searching for graduate courses and research opportunities in these departments that will benefit our program and our students.

In all the things I have described, one constant has been my experience working with graduate students, and it is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. I have directed many MA theses and doctoral dissertations on a range of topics. My work with graduate students regularly results in my co-authoring articles and book chapters with them. The interdisciplinary research I do sometimes allows me to fund graduate students as research assistants. This gives graduate students valuable training, opportunities to discover dissertation topics, and possibilities for scholarly publication. It is not the traditional model of English graduate study, but it is increasingly popular in rhetoric and composition programs and essential, I think, for engaged rhetorical study of science and technology and community participation.