
James Rushing Daniel, PhD
Assistant Professor of English and Director of Basic Writing and Assessment
Department of English
(973) 671-9000
Email
Fahy Hall
Room 359
James Rushing Daniel, PhD
Assistant Professor of English and Director of Basic Writing and Assessment
Department of English
My research theorizes how the writing classroom can valuably explore issues of precarity, economic inequality, and workers’ rights. I investigate how composition teachers can more effectively prepare students to parse and navigate contemporary economic conditions, discourses, and professional scenes and explore how collaborative writing and critical writing instruction can prepare students to analyze the rhetoric of the working world; confront injustice; combat workplace inequality; and advocate for themselves and others successfully.
I am 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 also 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 work in writing studies and rhetorical theory has also been published in 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.
Education
- Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison
- M.A., Carnegie Mellon University
- B.A., New York University
Accomplishments
Books
- Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition. Utah State University Press, 2022.
- Daniel, James Rushing, Katie Malcolm, and Candice Rai, eds. Writing across Difference: Theory and Intervention. Utah State University Press, 2022.
Journal Articles
- “Break Stuff: Negation, Totality, and the Project of Rhetorical Theory.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. March 2022 [9,378 words]
- “Burning Out: Writing and the Self in the Era of Terminal Productivity.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. Issue 30. February 2020 [8,301 words]
- “‘A Debt is Just the Perversion of a Promise’: Composition and the Student Loan.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 70, no. 2, 2018, pp. 195-221.
- “Freshman Composition as a Precariat Enterprise.” College English, vol. 80, no. 1, September 2017, pp. 63-85.
- “Everybody Will be Hip and Rich: Neoliberal Discourse in Silicon Valley.” Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, vol. 6, no. 2, 2017 [2,986 words]
- “The Event that We Are: Ontology, Rhetorical Agency, and Alain Badiou.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 49, no. 3, 2016, pp. 254-276.
Short Articles
- “Response to ‘Composition in the Age of Neoliberalism: An Interview with Holly Hassel and Joanne Baird Giordano’ by Patrick Sullivan” Forthcoming at College Composition and Communication.
- “Crisis at the HBCU.” Composition Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 2016, pp. 158-161.
Chapters
- “‘Gathering Dust in the Dark’: Inequality and the Limits of Composition.” In Writing across Difference: Theory and Intervention, edited by James Rushing Daniel, Katie Malcolm, and Candice Rai, 2022, pp. 39-55.
- “Dreamlandic Fantasy: Consumerism and Control in Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets.”Fear and Fantasy in a Global World. Eds. Susana Araújo, Marta Pacheco Pinto, and Sandra Bettencourt. Amsterdam and New York: Brill | Rodopi, 2015, pp. 35-53.
Essays
- “Higher Ed’s Cult of Growth.” Chronicle of Higher Education. August 5, 2022.
- “The Commodification of Jean-Michel Basquiat.” Jacobin. May 23, 2022.
- “Coachella is a Carnival for Capital.” Jacobin. April 15, 2022.
- “Dry Capitalism.” Damage. February 16, 2022.
- “Art and Capital Have Become Nearly Indistinguishable.” Jacobin. November 15, 2021.
- “Austin is Ground Zero for a Different Kind of Neoliberalism.” Jacobin. October 4, 2021.