Ryan Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College where he teaches course on contemporary rhetorical theory, rhetorics of health and medicine, composition, and critical literacies. His research engages the intersections of the rhetoric of health and medicine, rhetorical history, public sphere theory, and body and sexuality studies. These interests guide his current current work on the intimate phenomenologies of embodied risk, which is especially concerned with how concepts like vulnerability and immunity materialize in and through (inter)subjective, site-specific embodied performances. More concretely, Ryan’s work examines how sexual health risk is (and has been) imagined and negotiated by everyday publics. His book project, tentatively titled AIDS and Embodied Risk: The Invention of Safe Sex Before the Discovery of HIV, articulates these concerns by studying queer community responses to the North American AIDS crisis before HIV was identified as the syndrome’s causal agent in 1984. Informed by a corpus of public health ephemera, popular press editorials, personal correspondences, memoranda, AIDS service organization meeting minutes, and AIDS prevention materials produced by and for sexually active gay men, this project reconstructs the tense, community-driven recalibrations of queer sex that occurred as grassroots safe sex educators addressed the medical and social exigencies of the early AIDS crisis. He has published on this topic in Argumentation & Advocacy and Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Ryan earned his BA in English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University and both his MA and PhD in Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. He lives with his partner, dog, and three cats in Easton, Pennsylvania.