Leigh Ann Jones is an assistant professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she teaches rhetorical criticism and history, composition, and pedagogy in the undergraduate and graduate programs. She also codirects Hunter’s first-year writing course. In addition to her work on rhetorics of national masculinity, Jones has published on performative epistemology, a multimodal approach to composition pedagogy. She is the author of the SWR book From Boys to Men: Rhetorics of Emergent American Masculinity.
In this conversation with Vincent Portillo, Jones talks about the book’s focus on national organizations for boys and young men, including the Boy Scouts of America, the Sigma Chi college fraternity, and the US Army; the interdisciplinary nature of her book (it draws from history, political science, and rhetoric); the work of transforming a dissertation into a book; and some possibilities for political intervention in the rhet/comp classroom. (22:14)