Ben Wetherbee, PhD

I serve as Assistant Professor of English and Director of Composition at Northern Michigan University. A rhetoric and writing specialist with interdisciplinary interests, I teach the graduate colloquium for incoming composition instructors, as well as graduate courses in writing theory and rhetorical theory. At the undergraduate level, I teach a rhetoric for English and Communication majors, as well as courses in the first-year composition unit.

My research addresses a range of topics, recently including rhetorical tropes in scientific rhetoric, as well as relationships between classical topoi (“places” of argument) and modern-day meme culture. Broadly, I’m interested in rhetorics of science, rhetorical history and theory, rhetorical approaches to film, and twentieth-century theorists like Kenneth Burke, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Toulmin. My work appears in Rhetoric Review, the Journal for the History of Rhetoric, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, the Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Literacy in Composition Studies, the Henry James Review, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, and the Rhetoric Society of America volume Reinventing Rhetoric Scholarship, among other journals and collections. I serves as Review Editor for Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.

Prior to joining the NMU faculty in 2023, I served as tenure-track faculty at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma, where I received campus-wide teaching and service awards, founded an undergraduate research journal, and implemented an interdisciplinary writing emphasis within the English major.

Outside the classroom, I’m a guitarist, songwriter, movie buff, passable hockey center, and overcautious mountain biker. He lives in Marquette with my wife, two cats, walls of books, and a flotilla of stringed instruments.

I hold a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Louisville, an MA in Rhetoric and Composition from Miami University (Ohio), and a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan.

You can find me on Bluesky, Twitter, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, the NMU website, and you can contact me by email.