Robert (Rob) Mills

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Robert (Rob) Mills

Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric

Department/Office Information

Writing and Rhetoric
312 Lathrop Hall
  • M 1:00pm - 3:00pm (312 Lathrop Hall)
  • TR 10:00am - 11:15am (312 Lathrop Hall)

Contact

Rob Mills is a rhetorical scholar interested in law and American public culture. His current research examines how the rhetoric of maritime piracy, and its connections to international law and domestic politics, shaped attitudes towards sovereignty in the early-nineteenth-century United States. His book project, The Pirate and the Sovereign: Imagining the Rhetorical Limits of State Power, connects these pirate histories to contemporary conversations in the humanities and political theory concerning postsovereignty and sovereign violence.

His other research interests include the public function of institutional rhetorics (e.g., Supreme Court oral argument); foreign policy and international law in the Roberts Court; and contemporary rhetorical theory.

  • Ph.D., Program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
  • M.A., Human Communication and Social Influence, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA
  • B.A., Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta Georgia
  • CORE 111 - Conversations
  • WRIT 215 - Public Speaking
  • WRIT 242 - Stand and Speak: Feminist Rhetoric and Social Change
  • WRIT 363 - Pirate Rhetoric

 

 

  • Mills, Robert Elliot. "'It Begins in Corruption, Plunder, and Kidnapping': Slavery and the Law of Nations in the Early Republic." In Foreign Policy Rhetorics in a Global Era: Concepts and Case Studies. Edited by Allison M. Prasch and Sara L. McKinnon (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2024)
  • Mills, Robert Elliot. "Institutional Propaganda from the Civil War to the 1930s." In Persuasion and Propaganda. Edited by Mary Stuckey and Dominic Manthey (Pennsylvania State University, 2022).
  • Ray, Angela G. and Robert Elliot Mills. "Reading Freaks: Trump in an Analogical Hermeneutic Network." In Networking Argument. Edited by Carol C. Winkler (New York, Routledge, 2020).
  • Mills, Robert Elliot. "The Pirate and the Sovereign: Negative-Identification and the Constitutive Rhetoric of the Nation State." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17 (2014): 105-136.
  • Mills, Robert Elliot. "Sublime Argument: Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project." In Reasoned Argument and Social Change. Edited by Robert C. Rowland (Washington D.C., National Communication Association, 2011).

 

  • Communication Studies Graduate Dissertation Award, Northwestern University, 2018.
  • Kate b. and Hall J. Peterson Visiting Research Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2015.
  • Presidential Fellowship, Northwestern University, 2014-2016.
  • Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Graduate Affiliate, Northwetsern University, 2014-2015.
  • Top Paper, Student Division, NCA National Convention, 2010.