My Introduction to St. Lawrence

Greetings Laurentians! My name is Tyler Rife and I am a new Assistant Professor in the Performance & Communication Arts Department here at St. Lawrence University. While theater competitive performance, and creative media projects deeply animated my upbringing in Dayton, Ohio, and while I often embrace arts-based and performance methods in my scholarship, I was ultimately hired to serve as an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric! In this way, I might very well be located somewhere close to the “&” in “Performance & Communication Arts.” 

I received my PhD from Arizona State University where I studied the relationships between rhetoric, power and the environment. Without using too much jargon, my dissertation dealt with how large-scale ecological crises like anthropogenic climate change and our planet’s current sixth mass extinction event interact with cultural production, such that we might try to reconsider traditionally humanist concerns of rhetoric, politics and performance in more ecological ways. If you think that sounds strange, I will have to agree! However, I tend to embrace the notion that non-traditional approaches to any serious subject matter are pivotal not only to critical thinking, but social transformation. In general, and according to my faculty webpage, my often-interdisciplinary research “contextualizes cultural production and material politics in light of the Anthropocene, our present geologic epoch defined by human domination over earth systems.” In essence, I am interested in questions of how we might rethink the human amidst the radical planetary changes that some of its histories and structures have wrought. 

This ethos of my scholarship also extends into the classroom, where I work with students to creatively disentangle the relationships between discourse, society and the environment, threaded by an ethical investment in social and ecological justice. Both my recently developed courses, “Communication at the End of the World”, “Discourses of Nature”, and “Visual Rhetoric”, as well as my upcoming courses to be taught in Spring 2023, “Critical Rhetoric and Identity” and “Gender and Communication”, explicitly reflect these concerns, even if their different subject matters trace unique strains of intellectual thought. I also have the pleasure of teaching “Introduction to Communication Studies” here at SLU, which allows me the opportunity to gush over the aspects of the discipline that made me fall in love with it in the first place. 

I feel immensely fortunate to make a life here in the North Country with my partner, Ashley, who will be teaching in the PCA Department as well as in the FYS program this upcoming Spring. Ashley and I have enjoyed the process of finding community here in Canton and Potsdam, as well as frequently exploring the absurd number of awe-inspiring hiking trails in the area. We are especially taken by the waterfalls that pepper this geography. Having spent a year in Hamilton, New York, where I served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric at Colgate University, we are somewhat familiar with the shape of life in upstate New York. However, we are always open for advice on how to best embrace these cold winters after spending several years in Phoenix, Arizona’s exactly opposite climate.  

I am so excited to participate as a member of SLU’s community and look forward to spending time and place with more of you in the coming seasons.