EFL Welcomes New Faculty Member Brian Stone

This September, Brian Stone joined our department as Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition. Specializing in the history and theory of cultural rhetorics, assessment, and critical pedagogy, Dr. Stone's experience and expertise will contribute to the writing program and rhet/comp curriculum—and maybe even a local band. (He is a very good guitar player!) Dr. Stone joins us from Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, TX, where he worked for two years after recieving his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition at the Southern Illinois University Carbondale. At both institutions, Dr. Stone took leadership positions in the writing program, and at Huston-Tillotson, he co-developed a pilot freshman composition curriculum, called Critical Hip Hop Rhetoric Pedagogy, that was responsive to students' everyday experience of rhetoric. He also spearheaded assessment projects to gauge the effectiveness of the curriculum.

Dr. Stone's recent writing documents this work: he has an article in the current issue of Composition Studies, “HBCUs and Writing Programs: Critical Hip Hop Rhetoric Pedagogy and First-Year Student Success,” as well as two chapters in forthcoming edited collections. “Critical Hip Hop Rhetoric Pedagogy” will be published in Perspectives on Blackness in Writing Program Administration: From Margin to Center by NCTE's Studies in Writing and Rhetoric Series in 2017, and “Critical Hip-Hop Rhetoric Pedagogy and Freshman Composition at an Historically Black University: A Pilot Study” will be published in Beyond the Frontier: Innovations in First-Year Composition by Cambridge Scholars in 2018. Dr. Stone's current book project, The Art of Rhetoric in Early Medieval Ireland: Saints, Scholars, and Druids, digs into another facet of his interest in cultural rhetorics. Focused on the art of rhetoric in early medieval Ireland and Britain, it provides the first comprehensive study of the art of rhetoric in early Ireland, providing a theoretical framework for understanding the transition from the late Roman to the early medieval period—look for it in 2018 from Amsterdam University Press. And he has plans for more in the works! We are very glad that he has chosen to do that work here.

9/28/2016