Jonathan Hunt

(650) 736-1422

Personal bio
Jonathan Hunt is the Associate Director of PWR. He received a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in World Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Prior to coming to Stanford, he taught in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz, the French Department at UC Berkeley, and the English Department at Santa Clara University. Before becoming Associate Director, Jonathan taught a PWR 1 course on "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: Rhetoric and Deception" (Spring 2010). This course focused on fraud, misrepresentation, untruth, and balderdash in research and the public sphere. The goal of the course was to understand the incentives for deception in various situations, improve our ability to detect it, and develop rhetorical tools for increasing communication and understanding. Students were encouraged to pursue a line of inquiry based on their own interests and to discover the scholarly conversation on lying in their own fields. Jonathan's favorite PWR 2 course was "Cred: Rhetoric and Credibility in Research, Politics, and Everyday Life." In this course, students developed research projects focused on establishing, maintaining, repairing, and evaluating credibility in a range of specific contexts. The structure of the course permitted students to choose to study an area of particular interest or relevance to them. For example, an aspiring Silicon Valley entrepreneur could study the credibility challenges faces by innovators in technology, or an environmental scientist couldexamine the difficulty of maintaining credibility in the face of politically divergent audiences. Jonathan currently serves on the Editorial Board of Young Scholars in Writing, an international peer-reviewed journal of undergraduate research in writing and rhetoric. He has contributed to The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004) and The World Is a Text (Prentice Hall 2008). His main research interest involve the teaching of writing and writing program administration (grading, instructional technology) and unsanctioned or outlaw rhetorics: swearing, graffiti, communism.