Rod Taylor
Education
Ph.D., Indiana University
M.A., Missouri State University
B.S.Ed, Missouri State University
Bio
As an undergraduate, Rod Taylor studied educational theory and philosophy in college, earning his first degree in English education and spending three years teaching in the public school system. His background in secondary education has continued to color his research as a modernist literary critic and also influences his interest is rhetoric and language.
Before coming to Stanford, Rod was a visiting professor at Indiana University, where he also served as a pedagogy consultant, training new graduate-student instructors and aiding in the organization and development of IU's composition curriculum. Additionally, he served as Associate Director for J101, a segment of the GROUPS program, a federally funded initiative to help minorities and first-generation college students succeed at four-year institutions.
His current modernist book project focuses on the representation of students, teachers, administrators, classrooms, and educational institutions in a wide variety of modernist literature. D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis, to name just a few, criticized the education institutions of the early twentieth-century. Drawing on various works of these writers, this project provides an example of the extent to which classrooms, teachers, universities, and other pedagogical spaces, objects, and theories preoccupy modernist literature and argues that these authors' misgivings towards emergent forms of education significantly impacted their politics and their aesthetic practices.
In collaboration with Dr. Kelly Myers, he is also working on a textbook project that concerns performance and argument.
In addition to his academic work, Rod is a writer for BASS PLAYER magazine and is currently working on some instrumental compositions with Chicago-area saxophonist Jake Adams. He participates in all things bass and nature at Victor Wooten's annual Bass/Nature Camp, and enjoys using music as a means of teaching the benefits of being a life long learner.
When Rod is not teaching, researching, writing, or reading, you can find him playing bass, hiking, mountain biking, snowboarding, or doing any number of things that involve the outdoors. He, and his wife Kristen are the Resident Fellows of Robinson House, an upper class dorm in Sterling Quad.
Classes Taught at Stanford
The 'isms of Modernism
Postmodernism and the Rhetoric of Uncertainty
We Don't Need No Education: Students, Teachers, and the Rhetoric of Learning
Stepping Out from the Shadows: Music, the Bass Guitar, and the Rhetoric of Revolution
