Noah Roderick

About Noah Roderick

My research interests lie on the philosophical end of rhetoric, and they include rhetorical genre studies, object-oriented philosophy, and aesthetics and cognition. I believe that most of us—consciously or unconsciously—orient our thinking to some fundamental question that can never quite be answered: For some it is Why is there something rather than nothing? For others it might be How do we know what we know? For me, the question is How is there difference? This question threads through theories of information and entropy, quantum entanglement, biological evolution, language and cognition, cultural forms, and technology. My current research selects just a narrow band from that continuum, which is the emergence of difference in recurring rhetorical forms, such as genres and memes. I treat those rhetorical forms as dynamic, self-similar objects which evolve in response to changing social conditions but also through the mechanics of repetition itself. The goals of this research are to shed light on how new rhetorical possibilities open up within discourse communities and how distributed cognition is mediated.

I received my doctorate in English Studies from Illinois State University, with an emphasis in rhetoric and composition. My dissertation, Gods, Grammars, and Genres: Towards an Ethics of English Studies in Imperial Sovereignty, examined the ways in which the ontology of written language was understood and institutionalized in early and late modernity. My most recent monograph is The Being of Analogy, in which I argue that similarity should not be confined to human reasoning but should instead be considered an emergent property of reality of which human reason is a part. I have since refined this argument in published essays, and it continues to inform my recent thinking on genre evolution.

My current teaching includes courses in the BA program Språk, Retorik och Kommunikativt Ledarskap (Language, Rhetoric, and Communicative Leadership), as well as writing and cultural studies courses in English. I also teach philosophy of science courses at the doctoral level in the School of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences, as well at the Master’s level in the School of Health Sciences.