Joshua Trey Barnett

Joshua Trey Barnett is the Harry and Elissa Sichi Early Career Professor and Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (2022), which won the 2022 Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication; editor of Ecological Feelings: A Rhetorical Compendium (2025), which won the NCA Philosophy of Communication Division's Distinguished Edited Book Award; and co-editor of A Rhetorical Arboretum (2027). An interdisciplinary scholar of rhetoric and the environmental humanities, Professor Barnett's essays have appeared in many journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Environmental Communication, Ethics & the Environment, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. For his scholarship, he has received Penn State's Outstanding Associate Professor Award, NCA's Karl Wallace Memorial Award, the NCA Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division's Early Career Award, among other honors and distinctions. He is currently working on two book projects: an introduction to Hannah Arendt's environmental thought and an account of caring rhetorics. At the graduate level, Professor Barnett has recently led seminars on Hannah Arendt, environmental rhetoric, and more-than-human rhetorics. In addition to classes on special topics, he also regularly offers courses on rhetorical theory and communication ethics at the undergraduate level.