Jake Cowan , Ph.D.

Professional Overview

Bio: Jake Cowan is a professor in the Writing Studies program at Saint Mary's College of California. My scholarship & teaching are situated at the intersection of (post)structuralist ideological criticism & social media ecology, with a driving interest in using psychoanalysis to articulate how modern communication technologies function to structure belief, subjectivity, & epistemology. My research ranges from pop music to politics to the rhetorical possibilities of posting, while I teach classes on effective writing, creativity, media theory, & personal relationships.

Courses Taught: 

• Business Communication
• Meet the Beatles! 
• Writing and Research 

Publications:

• Cowan, J. (Forthcoming). “Rhetoric’s Unconscious: Freud, Burke, Lacan.”. Rhetoric and Philosophy.
• Cowan, J. (2021). “The Constitutive Rhetoric of Late Nationalism: Imagined Communities after the Digital Revolution.”. Rhetoric Review, 40(2).
• Cowan, J. (2019). “Freudian Typos, Rhetorical Parapraxis, and the Psychopathology of Digital Life.”. enculturation.
• Cowan, J. (2018). “Autobituary: The Life and/as Death of David Bowie & the Specters of Mourning.”. Miranda, 17.

Education

• PhD, English (Concentration Rhetoric). The University of Texas at Austin, 2020.
• MA, Philosophy of Religion and Literature. The University of Chicago, 2011.
• BA, Religious Studies. St. Edward’s University, 2009.