Victor Vitanza

Victor J. Vitanza is a Professor of English at Clemson University (South Carolina). He is the former Director of the interdisciplinary-transdisciplinary Ph.D. program in [http://www.clemson.edu/caah/rcid/ Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design], which is situated in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities.

Formerly at University of Texas at Arlington (1982–2005), Vitanza works in Media and Communication Philosophy, but that work also finds him teaching summer seminars at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he holds the Jean-Francois Lyotard Chair. Previously, he earned his second PhD at EGS under the title "Chaste Rape: Sexual Violence, Canon Formation, and Rhetorical Cultures" (director, Wolfgang Schirmacher; readers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben).

In 1978-1979, Vitanza received a National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship-in-Residence to work with Richard Emerson Young at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) on the topic of "Rhetorical Invention". Other participants included Sharon Bassett, James A. Berlin, Lisa Ede, David Fractenberg, Robert P. Inkster, Charles Kneupper, Sam Watson, Jr., Vickie Winkler, and William Nelson. Other participating colleagues included Peter Becker, Linda Flower, and Janice Lauer, all important figures in the field of Rhetoric and Composition.

Vitanza went on to found and publish the quarterly journal ''PRE/TEXT'' (1980–present). Along with Cynthia Haynes, Vitanza started the E-journal, ''Pre/Text: Electra(Lite)'', and created an on-line forum called Re/Inter/View listserv that currently has over 500 members. The month-long archived discussions hosted a range of figures from rhetoric and composition and elsewhere including Noam Chomsky, Jane Gallop, Sharon Crowley, and Geoffrey Sirc.

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