UC Berkeley
Rhetoric 2022-23 Colloquium Series Presents

“Genre and Impact: Academic Writing in Trying Times”

We often form academic projects by looking for an understudied niche where we can become the expert. It’s as if we were still governed by an imperial positivism that we no longer embrace. We write to convey what we have learned. Mostly however, we don’t read that way. Instead, we look for ideas that can change our thinking — or especially in this political moment — might make a difference in the world. Given the way ideas can travel through social media, we have a chance to reach a much wider readership than our own subfields. How can we think about genre in our own writing to allow it to have the most impact? What does publishing look like in this late/post-pandemic?

Kenneth Wissoker is Senior Executive Editor at Duke University Press, acquiring books across the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. He joined the Press as an Acquisitions Editor in 1991; became Editor-in-Chief in 1997; was named Editorial Director in 2005; and assumed his current position in 2020. In addition to his duties at the Press, he serves as Director of Intellectual Publics at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City. He has published more than twelve-hundred books which have won over one hundred and seventy prizes. Among the authors whose books he has published are Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, Achille Mbembe, Lauren Berlant, Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, José Muñoz, and Lisa Lowe. He speaks regularly on publishing at universities in the US and around the world.

Thursday, April 27, 5-7pm 
370 Dwinelle, Level G (In-person only event)
Open to the public

Presented by the Department of Rhetoric and cosponsored by Critical Theory, Film, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Questions? rfa@berkeley.edu