Jonathan W. Stone portrait
  • Associate Professor, Writing and Rhetoric Studies

Research Summary

Research interests include digital, multimodal, sonic and other sensory rhetorics. I am also interested in writing and rhetoric's relationship to environmental communication, religion, and historiography.

Education

  • B.A., Communication, University of Arizona
  • B.A., English | Literature , Arizona State University
  • B.A.E, English | Education, Arizona State University
  • M.A., English | Writing Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Ph.D., English | Writing Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Project: “Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of American Vernacular Music in the 1930s”

Biography

Dr. Jonathan W. Stone is an Associate Professor of Writing & Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah and the current Director of First-year Writing. He teaches classes on rhetorical theory and history—from ancient to contemporary contexts and across rhetoric’s multiple modes. Dr. Stone’s current research is focused on the ongoing impact of the persisting mythos of the American West on contemporary and historical efforts at environmental protections, indigenous sovereignty, and racial justice. Dr. Stone is also engaged in work that theorizes the rhetorical affordances of sound. He has published work on recorded sound’s influence in historical, cultural, and vernacular contexts, usually as folksongs, but also as popular music, religious podcasts, and radio programs.

Dr. Stone’s NEH supported book, Listening to the Lomax Archive was published in 2021 by the University of Michigan Press. The book investigates the careers of John A. Lomax and his son Alan during the Great Depression with focus on field recordings made for and stored by the Library of Congress's archive at the American Folklife Center. It is available as an open source publication with streaming audio content here.