Kirt H. Wilson’s research ranges broadly from the critical methods of rhetorical interpretation to anti-racist argument and from congressional debates about segregation after the civil war to contemporary attempts to memorialize the civil rights movement in museums and rituals of remembrance. Dr. Wilson is a rhetorical theorist and critic working at the intersection of public address and US history, critical/social theories of race and racism, political communication, and hermeneutics. He understands rhetoric as a fundamental human behavior that shapes meaning and experience.
In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place (Michigan State Press, 2002), associate editor for The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (2009), and co-editor of Making the Case: Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument (2012). His keynote presentation at the 2016 National Communication Association, “Dreams of Union, Days of Conflict: Communicating Social Justice and Civil Rights Memory in the Age of Barack Obama,” can be viewed on YouTube at https://youtu.be/WtEBKqcdzOw.
Professor Wilson is currently writing two book-length manuscripts. In the first he considers the theory and practices of mimesis (imitation) in the nineteenth-century as they relate to the political status of people of color. In the second he is uncovering the aesthetics and messages that construct our collective memories of the contemporary civil rights movement.
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Recently Published Research
- Wilson, Kirt H. Modernism and its Discontents: Rhetoric of the Twentieth Century. Introduction to Part VI of Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing, edited by Susan Jarrett and Andrea Lunsford. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, forthcoming 2025.
- Wilson, Kirt H. The Visual Rhetoric and Cultures of Twentieth Century Posters. In Norton Anthology of Rhetoric and Writing, edited by Susan Jarrett and Andrea Lunsford. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, forthcoming 2025.
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Wilson, Kirt H. Constructing Freedom and Equality: The Congressional Civil Rights Debates of Reconstruction. In Public Address of the Reconstruction and Gilded Age, edited by David Zarefsky. East Lansing: Michigan State Press, 2023, 277-314.
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Wilson, Kirt H and Kent Ono. Creating Equitable Opportunities: The Thoughts of Two Administrator Rhetoricians. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24 (2021): 169-189. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.24.1-2.0169.
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Wilson, Kirt H. Balancing Growth and Collegiality: Reflections on the Inaugural RSA Summer Project at the University of Nevada, Reno. Review of Communication (2020): 199-202 DOI: 10.1080/15358593.2020.1737203.
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Wilson, Kirt H. “Theory/criticism: A Functionalist Approach to the “Specific Intellectual” Work of Rhetorical Criticism.” Western Journal of Communication (2019): 1–17. DOI: 10.1080/10570314.2019.1696982
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Wilson, Kirt H. “Political Paradoxes and the Black Jeremiad: Frederick Douglass’s Immanent Theory of Rhetorical Protest.” Howard Journal of Communications (2018): 243-257. DOI: 10.1080/10646175.2018.1461714
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Wilson, Kirt H., and Kaitlyn G. Patia. “Authentic Imitation or Perverse Original? Learning About Race From America’s Popular Platforms.” In Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Angela G. Ray, and Paul Stob, 72–94. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.