James Rushing Daniel, PhD

Assistant Professor of English and Director of Basic Writing and Assessment
Department of English

My scholarship sits at the intersection of rhetorical theory, composition studies, and critical university studies. My central interest is the operation of capitalist argumentation in 21^st century contexts. In rhetorical theory, I explore the discourse of billionaires, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and the political class, seeking to understand how these figures rationalize growing wealth inequality and the disappearance of public goods. In composition studies, I consider how the writing classroom can valuably explore issues of precarity, economic inequality, and workers’ rights.

My current book project, Struggling Upward: How Entrepreneurialism Captured the American University (under advance contract at Johns Hopkins University Press), charts how entrepreneurship has become an ascendent force in American higher education and how it has undermined the educational project of the university. The book traces how entrepreneurial education evolved from an obscure subfield within a few elite business schools to become the global hegemon it is today. Noting the intellectual poverty of entrepreneurial education and the malign effects of higher education’s entrepreneurial culture, the book details how unionization and faculty resistance can challenge the corporatization of the university.

I am also the author of Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition (Utah State University Press, 2022), a text that challenges the field of composition to come to terms with capitalism’s devastating effects and that articulates a model of composition pedagogy framing writing as a critical, collaborative, and political praxis. Employing this model of writing, the book addresses how issues such as worker productivity, student debt, and the technology industry may be productively taken up in the composition classroom. I am additionally the lead editor of Writing across Difference: Theory and Intervention (Utah State University Press, 2022), a collection that explores how inclusive and pluralistic approaches to composition teaching can support the bridging of racial, linguistic, and class divides in the writing classroom and in institutional contexts.

My research has also been published in numerous journals, including Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College English, Philosophy & Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Enculturation: A Journal of Writing Rhetoric and Culture, and Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society.