Jeff Bennett
Professor and Chair of Communication Studies
Jeff Bennett is Professor and Chair of Communication Studies. His research tends to focus on two primary areas of study: the rhetoric of health and medicine and LGBTQ studies. His most recent research project focused on the rhetoric of diabetes management. In his book, Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease, he argues that popular anecdotes, media representations, and communal myths are as meaningful as medical and scientific understandings of disease when contemplating diabetes’ public character. Bennett examines the confusing and contradictory public depictions of diabetes to demonstrate how “management” is not only clinical, but also cultural. Bennett has lived with type-one diabetes since 2004 and speaks from personal experience about the many ways diabetes is enlivened in the popular imaginary.
He is also the author of Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance, which scrutinizes the federal donor deferral policy that prevents men who have sex with men from donating blood.
You can learn more about his work here.
Follow him on Twitter @jeffreyabennett
Representative Publications
Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Resisting the Rhetoric of Indexing: Disability, Access, and the 2005 Tennessee State Capitol Sit-in,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19 (2022): 235-253.
Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Diabetes Twitter: A Communal Retort to Capitalism,” (Un)doing Diabetes: Representation, Disability, Culture, eds. Bianca Frazer and Heather Walker (New York: Palgrave, 2022), 23-41.
Lora Arduser and Jeffrey A. Bennett, eds., “The Rhetoric of Chronicity,” Rhetoric of Health and Medicine 5 (2022): 123-239.
Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Mourning and Memorializing in the COVID-19 Era,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19 (2022): 30-36.
Jeffrey A. Bennett, “Everyday Life and the Management of Risky Bodies in the COVID-19 Era,” Cultural Studies 35 (2021): 347-357.