Paul Stob
Professor of Communication Studies
Director of Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership; Director of A&S College Core
PAUL STOB is Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership. He is also inaugural Director of the A&S College Core.
His research and teaching focus on the intersection of rhetoric and intellectual culture, with particular emphasis on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States. He is the author of William James & the Art of Popular Statement (Michigan State University Press, 2013) and Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People (Michigan State University Press, 2020). He is co-editor (with Angela Ray) of Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century (Penn State University Press, 2018).
Paul’s current book manuscript, which will be published in 2025 by Counterpoint Press, is titled Empire of Skulls: A Story of Phrenology, the Fowlers, and the Secrets of the Human Mind. The book explores the rise of practical phrenology in the United States via the work of one family, the Fowlers, who not only built a cultural empire around the science but made it central to various reform movements.
In addition, Paul is a co-author (with Stephen E. Lucas) of The Art of Public Speaking (McGraw-Hill Higher Education), a popular public-speaking textbook used around the world.
Representative publications
“Black Hands Push Back: Reconsidering the Rhetoric of Booker T. Washington,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 145–165.
“Jeannette Rankin’s Democratic Errand to Washington,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 20, no. 1 (2017): 86–98.
“Science, Religion, and the Rhetoric of Revelation: The Case of the Christian Science Board of Lectureship,” Journal of Communication & Religion 39, no. 1 (2016): 46–64.
“Sacred Symbols, Public Memory, and the Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll Remembers the Civil War,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 19, no. 2 (2016): 275–306.
“The Rhetoric of Individualism and the Creation of Community: A View from William James’s ‘The Will to Believe,’” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2014): 25–45.