DT Spitzer-Hanks

I am a former semi-professional musician and early childhood educator, and a current teacher of composition, poetics, literature and rhetoric at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. I earned my Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in March, 2018. My research agenda is highly interdisciplinary, combining material and concepts from rhetorical studies, communication theory, gender and ethnicity studies, literary studies and pedagogical theory and practice.

In my literary work I primarily study the 'long' transatlantic nineteenth century, and I apply a decolonial feminist theoretical lens both to British and to American cultural developments between 1760 and 1925. I'm currently engaged in a project which tracks the influence of idealist Hellenism on the aesthetics of embodiment in nineteenth-century Britain from the 1816 Parliamentary purchase of the 'Elgin' Marbles to Oscar Wilde's 1895 trials for gross indecency. This research engages with the concept of rhetorical Greekness as an ethnogenetic narrative that reifies the transcendent value of hegemonic masculinity, whiteness, abledness and ultimatnly of coloniality.

This project on ‘British Greekness’ connects to another project influenced by literary studies, which applies a similar concept of rhetorical Greekness to the American nineteenth century, and asks how (or whether) the symbolism enacted through the Greek Revival architecture of Washington, D.C. and the similar architectural styles of Southern plantation homes are connected to Americanity and a developing sense of American identity. This project applies the concept of the communicative construction of reality to the study of American classical reception and attends to a wide range of texts including architecture, poetry, prose, and the plastic arts.

I am also interested in using literary analysis to explore the connections between masculinity and ecological change. In a study of Hardy’s animal poetry I argue that we can see a ‘norm of deep discordance’ that amounts to an early form of posthumanism, and in a study of four poems from Seamus Heaney’s breakout collection North, I argue that we can clearly see connections between British colonial violence in Ireland, British destruction of Irish ecologies, and Heaney’s misogyny. These connections are also visible in debates about anthropogenic climate change, and taken together these two essays express my interest in promoting a masculinity characterized by an ecological as well as a humanistic form of decoloniality.

My research also encompasses university studies, and in this work I am interested in applying a feminist, trauma-informed, process-oriented praxis to what is sometimes called the 'corporate' university. In a past project (Gender and Education 2016) I have identified the need for academic feminists to question the product-orientation of the 'corporate' university, and in a recent artIcle published in Pedagogy I am asking how trauma-informed educational practice can be applied in the composition classroom, considering the focal role of trauma and of disordered writing affect in many college students’ lives.

My rhetorical studies-focused research deals with sympathy, which I read as a category of rhetorical appeal that refers to the politics of recognition applicable in a given rhetorical situation. By studying the way rhetors use sympathy strategies to persuade audiences, and more generally by studying how we all use rhetorical means to seek sympathy in our daily lives, I believe we can better see and perhaps more effectively make changes to the politics of recognition within which we seek subjective legibility.