Assistant Professor
Writing & Rhetoric
Associate Faculty | Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Office: Humanities 2101
Office Hours: On Leave 25/26 AY
Ryan Mitchell is a rhetorical theorist and critic. His scholarship engages with the vernacular construction and transhistorical circulation of health risks, drawing on interdisciplinary theories from the rhetoric of health and medicine, critical rhetorical history, public sphere theory, queer theory and criticism, and body studies. His current work focuses on the medical imaginaries that surround popular appraisals of sexual health and safety, with particular attention paid to the rhetorical force of sensation and feeling.
His writings have been published or are forthcoming in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Argumentation & Advocacy, Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, Poroi, Peitho, and Journal for the History of Rhetoric. His first book, AIDS & Embodied Risk: Inventing Safer Sex (under advance contract with Ohio State University Press), is a rhetorical history of the queer sexual health pedagogies developed during the first decade of the North American AIDS crisis (1981-1991). It traces how early sexual health educators and activists harnessed pleasurable sensations to transform the body into a source of rhetorical invention and political resistance. His scholarship on the history of the early AIDS crisis has been recognized and awarded by The American Society for the History of Rhetoric.
Ryan is also an award-winning, first-generation scholar-teacher. He received both his Ph.D. and M.A. in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and his B.A. (summa cum laude) in English Writing and Rhetoric from St. Edward’s University. At Stony Brook, Ryan teaches courses on critical health humanities, rhetorical theory and criticism, and composition.