Professional Staff

PhD, Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley, 1998

Daniel M. Gross is Professor of English and Affiliate Faculty in the Critical Theory Emphasis. His research in rhetoric runs along three tracks: writing and communication, history of the disciplines, and medical humanities. When it comes to writing and communication, Professor Gross has been deeply influenced by his time at the University of Iowa, where he worked with a large Communication Studies department typical of public universities in the Midwest, and where writing and speaking pedagogies are deeply integrated. His publications in writing and communication include an interview in Composition Forum on “The Passions of Rhetoric and Composition,” and a critical piece in the journal Pedagogy on the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.

In terms of history of the disciplines, Professor Gross has been working since his dissertation on rhetoric and the origins of the human sciences, arguing that the early human sciences including psychology, politics, and pedagogy were first rhetorical arts designed to move people, before they were partially reconfigured as descriptive sciences. Publications along these lines include a piece in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and a forthcoming book Being-Moved: Rhetoric As the Art of Listening (University of California Press 2020). His work in the medical humanities focuses on emotion, also from a history-of-rhetoric perspective.

Publications include The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago 2007), and Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion between Science and the Humanities (Chicago 2017). He has received grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from the University of California Office of the President, which has recently funded his gamification, and online teaching initiatives.