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Ned O'Gorman

Profile picture for Ned O'Gorman

Contact Information

3001 Lincoln Hall, MC-456
702 S Wright Street
Urbana IL 61801
Professor

Biography

Ned O’Gorman is Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he writes and teaches about the history of rhetoric, media studies, and political culutre. He is the author most recently of Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times (2020, University of Chicago Press). He is also author of the award-winningLookout America! The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (written with Kevin Hamilton, 2019, Dartmouth University Press), the award-winning The Iconoclastic Imagination: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11 (2016, University of Chicago Press), and Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy (2011, Michigan State University Press). He has written numerous journal essays on topics related to rhetorical theory, aesthetics, religion, political  theory, and political history, and has appeared on a number of podcasts and radio shows. He is former President of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric and is currently editor of Journal for the History of Rhetoric. In 2020, the University of Ilinois named him University Scholar. Learn more about Professor O'Gorman here: nogorman.org

Research Interests

History of Rhetoric
Cold War
Media Studies

Research Description

20th-century American political culture.

Education

PhD, The Pennsylvania State University

Grants

2011-12, National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant

Awards and Honors

Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Courses Taught

CMN 310, The Rhetorical Tradition
CMN 415/ CLCV 415, Classical Rhetorics
CMN 416, Early-Modern Rhetorics
CMN 417, Contemporary Rhetorics
CMN 538, Graduate, Cold War Rhetorical Culture
CMN 529, Graduate, Media Technologies
CMN 529, Graduate, Concepts in Communication Studies
CMN 529, Graduate, Media Theory, Old and New
CMN 210, Public Communication in Everyday Life

Additional Campus Affiliations

Professor, Communication
Professor, Center for Global Studies

Highlighted Publications

O'Gorman, T. E. (2016). The Iconoclastic Imagination: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11. University of Chicago Press.

Hamilton, K., & O'Gorman, T. E. (2018). Lookout America! The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War. (Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture). University Press of New England.

View all publications on Illinois Experts

Recent Publications

O’Gorman, N. (2024). How liberals lost the public: Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and the critique of “traditional democratic theory”. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 110(3), 419-441. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2024.2319119

Hamilton, K., & O'Gorman, N. (2021). Seeing Experimental Imperialism in the Nuclear Pacific. Media+Environment, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.18496

Hamilton, K., & O'Gorman, N. (2021). The U.S. Air Force Academy and the Grounding of Atomic Modernity. Web publication/site https://www.coloradonuclearatlas.org/essay-narrative/grounding-atomic-modernity/essays-path

Hamilton, K., & O'Gorman, N. (2021). Where Is the Nuclear Sovereign? In M. Bernard-Donals, & K. Jensen (Eds.), Responding to the Sacred: An Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric (pp. 172-198). Penn State University Press. https://doi.org/10.5325/j.ctv1g80933.12

O'Gorman, N. (2020). Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226683294

View all publications on Illinois Experts