Greetings and welcome to my website! My name is Trent M Kays, and I’m a PhD student and Graduate Instructor in the Department of Writing Studies and Research Assistant for the Digital Humanities 2.0 Project, both at the University of Minnesota (UMN). I have taught a variety of writing intensive courses, including: first-year writing, business and professional writing, creative nonfiction writing, writing about objects, and others. My research interests focus on digital rhetoric, critical pedagogy, and the Internet.
In addition to being a writing teacher and researcher, I write for both academic and non-academic audiences. I’m a columnist for The Minnesota Daily, where I write a weekly opinion column on higher education, culture, and society; I’m a contributor for The Good Men Project, where I write monthly about 21st century masculinity, gender, and culture; I’m Open Essays Section Editor for the Writing About Writing Newsletter, debuting for the 2012 CCCC; and I was a founding contributor for GradHacker, where I wrote biweekly on graduate student life issues.
I completed my MA in Professional and Technical Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) during the summer of 2010. I wrote my MA thesis on the performance of identity through narrative within social networking sites. I earned my BA in Professional and Technical Writing and my BA in History from UALR during the fall of 2008. As an undergraduate, I worked in the University Writing Center where I tutored writers of all abilities. While a graduate student at UALR, I was the Assistant Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Rhetoric and Writing and taught in the First-Year Composition program. In addition, I served as the President of the UALR Graduate Student Association.
What exactly does “Rhetorical Rumination” mean? Well, if we look at the definition of each word, we can see how I envision this site: rhetorical–“of, concerned with, or having the nature of rhetoric” and rumination–”to chew again or over and over; to meditate on; ponder.” So, I am dedicated to exploring and understanding the “holistic rhetoric,” or the rhetoric that is everything and anything. However, rhetoric is never static and, as such, requires constant investigation or chewing. In short, this site is where I chew on the cud that is rhetoric.
