David Depew
Ph.D. University of California at San Diego
114 Becker Communication Studies Building & Bowman House
phone (319) 335-2254 & (319) 335-2753
david-depew@uiowa.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Projects
Links of Interest
David Depew
Rhetoric of Biology & Biotechnology
Critical History & Rhetoric of Inquiry
David Depew's interests and expertise centers on rhetoric of inquiry and on critical history of rhetoric. He shares an appointment with Iowa's internationally known Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI).
His own interests center on the discourses of biology (Darwinism, Creationism, and the rhetoric of biotechnology, especially the rhetoric surrounding the implications of the Human Genome Project) and in critically reconstructing the history of rhetoric by focusing on the see-saw relationship between rhetoric and philosophy and their dialectical interpenetration. At the graduate level, he teaches courses on orality and literacy in ancient Athens, the emergence of modernity, and the ideology of the aesthetic from the late 18th century to contemporary postmodernism. At the undergraduate level, he teaches courses in The Classical Tradition in Rhetoric and Rhetoric of Technology.