I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. Currently, I serve as the Director of UVA’s Writing and Rhetoric Program.
I study how training, socialization, and identity-formation work, how we develop beliefs, capacities, and perspectives — or what I call trained vision. For example, how does repeated exposure to the discourses, genres, displays, frameworks, and practices of our professional, political, and cultural communities shape the way we see the world? To understand this, my work draws on theories of sense-making (perception, imagination, persuasion, and affect) from rhetorical theory and cognitive science. Using ethnographic, rhetorical, and historical research methods, I study mostly visual objects, digital media, educational settings, and historical texts and objects.
My ethnographic monograph, Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy Lab, examines how the discourses, multimodal displays, embodied practices, and actual human bodies of the cadaver lab shape medical and dental students’ perceptions of the body, of learning, and of medicine.
My current book project is a digital ethnography of the visual media ecologies that make possible contemporary conspiracy theories, like QAnon.
Most specifically, my primary research and teaching interests include:
- Conspiracy Theory Rhetoric
- Propaganda & Disinformation
- History of Rhetoric
- Visual Rhetoric/Visual Culture
- Scientific Communication
T. Kenny Fountain 