Ben Wetherbee - NMU English

BA, English Language and Literature, the University of Michigan
MA, Rhetoric and Composition, Miami University
PhD, Rhetoric and Composition, the University of Louisville

Ben Wetherbee serves as Assistant Professor of English and Director of Composition at NMU. A rhetoric and writing specialist with interdisciplinary interests, he teaches the graduate colloquium for incoming composition instructors, as well as graduate courses in writing theory and rhetorical theory. At the undergraduate level, he teaches a rhetoric class for English and Communication majors, as well as courses in the first-year composition unit.

Ben’s research addresses a range of topics, recently including rhetorical tropes in scientific rhetoric, as well as relationships between classical topoi (“places” of argument) and modern-day meme culture. Broadly, he is interested in rhetorics of science, rhetorical history and theory, rhetorical approaches to film, and twentieth-century theorists like Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Toulmin. His work appears in Rhetoric Review, the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Literacy in Composition Studies, the Henry James Review, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, and the Rhetoric Society of America volume Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship, among other journals and collections. He serves as Review Editor for Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.

Prior to joining the NMU faculty in 2023, Ben served as tenure-track faculty at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, where he received campus-wide teaching and service awards, founded an undergraduate research journal, and implemented an interdisciplinary writing emphasis within the English major.

Outside the classroom, Ben is a guitarist, songwriter, movie buff, passable hockey center, and overcautious mountain biker. He lives in Marquette with his wife, two cats, walls of books, and a flotilla of stringed instruments.

• Theories and histories of rhetoric
• Rhetorics of science
• Writing pedagogy and writing program administration
• Representations of student writers
• Rhetorical perspectives on film

“Epideictic Priming amid COVID-19: Metonymy under the Microscope.” Journal for the History of Rhetoric, vol. 26, no. 2, 2023, pp. 229-42.

“Masked Meanings: COVID-19 and the Subversion of Stasis Hierarchy.” Coauthored with Genevieve Gordon. Rhetoric Review, vol. 41, no. 4, 2022, pp. 249-65.

“The Other Toulmin Model: Concepts, Topoi, Evolution.” Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship: 50 Years of the Rhetoric Society of America, edited by Roxanne Mountford, Dave Tell, and David Blakesley, Parlor, 2020, pp. 78-86.

“‘Redemption Follows Allocution’: Dan Harmon and the #MeToo Apology.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, vol. 9, no. 3/4, 2019, pp. 112-25.

“Dystopoi of Memory and Invention: The Rhetorical ‘Places’ of Postmodern Dystopian Film.” Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, vol. 2, no. 2, 2018, pp. 116-34.

“Literacy and Rhetoric as Complementary Keywords.” Literacy in Composition Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 103-12.

“Jameson, Burke, and the Virus of Suggestion: Between Ideology and Rhetoric.” Henry James Review, vol. 36, no. 3, 2015, pp. 280-87.

“Picking Up the Fragments of the 2012 Election: Memes, Topoi, and Political Rhetoric.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 5, no. 1, 2015, 10 pp.

“The Audiovisual Palimpsest: Rhetoric, Poetics, and Heteroglossia in Mystery Science Theater 3000.” Reading Mystery Science Theater 3000: Critical Approaches, edited by Shelley S. Rees, Scarecrow, 2013, pp. 13-29 [lead chapter].