Jordynn Jack

Assistant Professor, Department of English

My book, Science on the Homefront: The Rhetoric of Women Scientists in World War II, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press (Fall 2009). In it, I examine speeches, articles, pamphlets, books, and reports written by female scientists during World War II. I argue that four tropes, gender neutrality, objectivity, expertise, and technical rationality, shaped women’s scientific rhetorics in ways that upheld the norms of masculine scientific culture while downplaying or discouraging women’s unique voices. This project won a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada doctoral fellowship and the 2006 James Berlin Memorial Dissertation Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

I have also conducted research on Kenneth Burke, on rhetoric and public memory, and on women’s rhetorics. Recent publications include:

• “Acts of Institution: Embodying Feminist Rhetorical Methodologies in Space and Time.” Rhetoric Review (accepted, forthcoming).

• “Lydia J. Roberts’ Nutrition Research and the Rhetoric of ‘Democratic’ Science.” College Composition and Communication (accepted, forthcoming).

• “Kenneth Burke’s Constabulary Rhetoric: Socio-Rhetorical Critique in Attitudes Toward History.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38.1 (2008): 66-81.

• “Space, Time, Memory: Gendered Recollections of Wartime Los Alamos.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37.3 (2007): 229-250.

• “Chronotopes: Forms of Time in Rhetorical Argument.” College English 69.1 (2006): 52-73.

• “‘The Piety of Degradation’: Kenneth Burke, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, and Permanence and Change.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.4 (2004): 446-468.

       

Department of English and Comparative Literature | Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 | University of North Carolina | Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
phone: 919.962.5481 | fax: 919.962.3520