Dr. Barry Brummett

Charles Sapp Centennial Professor in Communication
Chair
CMA 7.114
512-471-5251
512-232-1714
FAX: 512-471-3504
brummett@mail.utexas.edu

View Dr. Brummett's vita in PDF format

Dr. Barry Brummett (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1978) is the Chair of the department. He taught at Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before coming to the University of Texas-Austin. Brummett's research interests turned early to the theories of Kenneth Burke and to epistemology and rhetoric. In those studies Brummett laid the foundation for a research program that investigates the functions and manifestations of new rhetoric. One line of research took him into the study of apocalyptic rhetoric. Brummett's most recent, ongoing interests are in the rhetoric of popular culture. He has developed a general theoretical basis for understanding that rhetoric that has enabled his investigations of the rhetoric of symbolic forms.  Brummett has in press an edited volume of essays on performative dimensions of sports and games, and on a textbook on techniques of close reading. Brummett is the author of the scholarly monographs A Rhetoric of Style, Rhetorical Dimensions Of Popular Culture, Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics, The World and How We Describe It, and Rhetorical Homologies. He has edited Landmark Essays: Kenneth Burke, Uncovering Hidden Rhetorics, and Reading Rhetorical Theory, and is the author or coauthor of several textbooks and numerous scholarly essays.