Oren M. Abeles

My research traces the way rhetoric articulates science and technology, in all their senses. I look at scientific texts, technical objects, and natural phenomena, attempting to discern whether classical and contemporary notions of rhetoricity can explain how these assemblies perform, figure, and turn. I am currently developing a book project that historicizes the figures of speech and tropes critical to the emergence of both natural selection and evolutionary genetics, as well as counter-rhetorics that offer more holistic and emergentist theories of biological complexity. Drawing from Lacanian theories of trope, as well as classical principles of style, it studies the way arrangement, metaphor, and metonymy created linear and predictable logics of evolutionary causality, despite the inherent complexity of ecological relations.

I teach introductory courses in rhetoric, as well as more advanced courses in the rhetoric of science, and the history of rhetoric and composition.