Atilla Hallsby
224 Church St SE
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
I am an assistant professor in the Communication Studies department, Rhetorical Studies area, at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My research program is about how rhetoric shapes public perceptions about secrecy, transparency, and artificial intelligence in American public culture. My book, Sovereign, Settler, Leaker, Lie: Forms of the Secret in U.S. Political Rhetoric (The Ohio State University Press, 2026) offers a multi-century genealogy of secrecy as a governing singifier, a rhetorical-deconstructionist theory of the secret, and distinct cases informed by psychoanalysis, histories of race and racism, queer theory, and critiques of settler-colonialism. The topical focus of the case-driven chapters concerns how presidential scandals, dogwhistles, national security leaks, and detective fiction have shaped the spectacle-bound status quo of U.S. politics in the first and second decades of the 21st century.
I primarily teach undergraduate and graduate-level courses in rhetorical theory and topics courses on the secrecy, surveillance, and algorithmic culture. I am grateful to the University of Minnesota Libraries for their support of my open-access textbook (Reading Rhetorical Theory: Speech, Representation, and Power), developed during the early COVID-19 pandemic for flipped learning and online (synchronous/asynchronous) delivery. Other teaching resources can be found at my newsletter site (The Rhetoric UnTextbook), which contains materials on the rhetoric of secrecy and surveillance and primers for my graduate-level rhetorical theory course.
Educational Background
- Ph.D.: Rhetorical Studies, University of Georgia, 2015
- M.A.: Rhetoric and Public Advocacy, University of Iowa, 2010
Specialties
- Rhetorical Theory and Criticism
- Secrecy and Surveillance Studies
- Critical Algorithm Studies
- Critical Artificial Intelligence Studies