Joshua Trey Barnett

Professional Bio

Joshua Trey Barnett studies the rhetoric of earthly coexistence. How, he asks, do we come to feel and to know that we are part of – and not apart from – the earth that bore and sustains us? Professor Barnett’s first book, Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence (Michigan State University Press, 2022), uncovers the rhetorical practices that set ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to a more connected, caring earthly coexistence. Mourning in the Anthropocene won the 2022 Tarla Rai Peterson Book Award in Environmental Communication from the National Communication Association. His second book, a much-anticipated collection of essays entitled Ecological Feelings: A Rhetorical Compendium, is forthcoming from Michigan State University Press. Ecological Feelings features essays by scholars on the rhetorical dimensions of a wide range of ecological feelings: care, concern, contempt, empathy, fear, grief, hope, joy, numbness, optimism, possessiveness, regret, and saudades (akin to nostalgia). Currently, Professor Barnett is writing a book about rhetoric, care, and violence in ecological worlds.

Professor Barnett has also written essays for numerous rhetoric and environmental humanities journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Environmental Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Ethics & the Environment. For his scholarship, Professor Barnett has received the 2022 Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award and the 2021 Early Career Award from the National Communication Association. He is associate editor for special issues of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, an editor of Culture, Theory & Critique, and serves on the editorial boards of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Environmental Communication, QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, Women & Language, and Capacious: A Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. In the past, Professor Barnett has offered courses on Earthen Rhetorics, Ecological Communication, More-Than-Human Rhetorics, Rhetorical Theory, Rhetorical Criticism, and Philosophy and Rhetoric, among others. He joined the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences in 2020 and holds a joint appointment at the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences.