Stephen Hartnett

Associate Professor

Curriculum Vitae

Education: Ph.D., University of California at San Diego

Research Interests: Rhetorical theory; rhetorical criticism of historical and contemporary discourse; American Studies; the political-economy of crime and punishment (19th and 20th century) including the death penalty, investigative poetics.

Current Research: With his co-author, Laura Stengrim, Professor Hartnett is working on a book entitled Empire of Deception: The War in Iraq, Globalization & The Twilight of Democracy. As part of his work as a Research Fellow of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Professor Hartnett is also working on Executing Democracy: Enlightenment, Modernity, and Capital Punishment in America, 1683-1855. As an Advisor to the Center for Democracy in a Multiracial Society, Professor Hartnett is organizing a conference for the spring 2004 entitled, "Education or Incarceration? Schools and Prisons in a Punishing Democracy."

Representative Recent Publications:

Hartnett, S. & Stengrim, L. (forthcoming in spring 2004). "'The Whole Operation of Deception': Reconstructing President Bush's Rhetoric of Weapons of Mass Destruction." Cultural Studies & Critical Methodologies.

Hartnett, S. (2003). Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror. AltaMira/Rowman & Littlefield.

Hartnett, S. (2002). Democratic Dissent & The Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Hartnett S., & Branham, R. (2002). Sweet Freedom's Song: "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and Democracy in America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Hartnett, S. (2002). Fanny Fern's 1855 Ruth Hall, The Cheerful Brutality of Capitalism, and The Irony of Sentimental Rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(1), 1-18.

Hartnett, S. (2000). A rhetorical critique of the drug war, slavery, and the ‘nauseous pendulum’ of reason and violence. The Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 16(3), 247-271.