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Jake Cowan

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Department: Academics

Professional Overview

Dr. Jake Cowan is a rhetorician, critical theorist, and digital writing scholar. He received his PhD in Rhetoric & Writing from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was an Assistant Director in the Digital Writing & Research Lab, and holds an MA in Philosophy & Literature from the University of Chicago. Dr. Cowan’s research interests revolve around the impact of emergent technologies on contemporary communication, instances of the unconscious within digital media, and the rhetorical efficacy of online identifications and ideologies. He has published widely on topics ranging from the inventive potential of typos, the topological structure of writing in digital environments, the compositional technique of David Bowie, and the technological underpinnings of nationalist politics—work for which Dr. Cowan was awarded the University of Texas at Austin’s James L. Kinneavy Prize for Scholarship in Rhetoric & Composition. Outside of his academic career, Dr. Cowan has worked as a marketing specialist, advertising consultant, and content writer within the tech industry in the Silicon Hills of Austin.