Stephanie Houston Grey
Associate Professor
PhD: Indiana University (Rhetoric and Public Address)
Phone: (225) 578-6893
E-mail: houston@lsu.edu
Office: 224 Coates Hall
“Stand back: I am going to try science.”
Areas of Interest
· Science and Technology Studies and the Rhetoric of Sciences (Environment, Food, Risk)
· Consumption (Food Cultures, Corporeality, Industrialism)
· Trauma Studies
I study purity and excess in the Anthropocene through the analytic lenses of rhetoric, discourse theory, aesthetics, and cultural studies. As a scholar who is interdisciplinary by training as well as inclination, I examine the dialectic of consciousness in history, as guided and shaped not only by economics, politics, and philosophy but imperatives of form, expression, and dialogue.
My scholarship focuses on two broad and variegated themes. First, I attend to debates about science that carry into the wider culture, including studies of the atomic age, environmentalism, and the rhetoric and politics of food. Second, I examine social traumas and points of resistance in the pathological culture of consumption, including agrarian acts amid the hegemony of industrial agriculture; the plight of “traditional” lifeways in the hydrocarbon economy; and the collective anxieties manifested by the “eating, American style” as disordered eating, American style, traverses the globe.
While I engage “big questions” and public debates, I attend to their reflections in language and their impacts on particular people, cultures, minds, and bodies. As an advocate concerned with resistance and justice, I examine the lives and talk of “outsiders” who provide prophetic and poignant expressions of the times, while pointing the way toward a more inclusive and sustainable future.
Selected Publications
Books
Rooted Resistance: Agrarian Myth in Modern America. Co-authored with Ross Singer and Jeff Motter. University of Arkansas Press, 2020. Audiobook Redwood Audiobooks, 2021.
Live From the Sacrifice Zone: Citizen Resistance in Petro-colonial Louisiana. Photographs by Julie Dermansky. Under contract with West Virginia University Press.
Articles
“‘A Banquet for the World’: Democracy and Consumerism in Disney’s Food Will Win the War.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 35 363-375 (2018).
“Dominance and Danger in South Louisiana: Social Media and the Construction of Risk and Authority in the Fight over Fracking.” Co-authored with Johanna Broussard. The Journal of Electronic Communication 27/1-2 (2017).
“A Perfect Loathing: The Feminist Expulsion of the Eating Disorder,” K.B. Journal 7/2 (2011) www.kbjournal.org/grey.
"Writing Redemption: Trauma and the Authentication of the Moral Order in the Hibakusha [atomic bomb survivor] Literature," Text and Performance Quarterly 22/1 (2002): 1-23.
"The Statistical War on Equality: Visions of American Virtuosity in The Bell Curve," The Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 303-329.
Book Chapters
“The Tail of the Snake: Social Protest and Survivance in South Louisiana.” In Casey Ryan Kelly and Jason Edward Black (Eds.) Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self Determination, 225-243. (New York: Peter Lang, 2018) 225-243.
“Contagious Speech: The Ascent of the Eating Disorder Trigger in Consumer America.” Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context. Ed. Emily Knox (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2017) 37-53.
Selected Editorial Work
Editor, Louisiana Speaks: The Journal of the Louisiana Communication Association, 2019-current.
Curation
“One Life, One World: Exploring the AIDS Pandemic,” in association with the Ping Chong play Cocktail, Swine Palace Theater Louisiana State University, 2006-07.
Selected Courses Taught
Graduate
Introduction to Graduate Studies
Seminar: Rhetoric of Science and Technology
Seminar: The Public Sphere
Undergraduate
Rhetoric and Civilization
Propaganda
Science Communication
Environmental Communication
For LSU Online
Political Communication