About Adam

A committed teacher, midnight believer, and a Slow Jam in a Hip Hop World, Adam Banks is Professor and Faculty Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. He also serves as an affiliate faculty member of the programs in African and African American Studies and Science, Technology and Society. Prior to arriving at Stanford he served on the faculty of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky and the Syracuse University Writing Program. In addition to these academic appointments he served as the Langston Hughes Visiting Professor of English at the University of Kansas, and jointly with Andrea Lunsford as the Inaugural Rocky Gooch Visiting Professors for the Bread Loaf School of English. He is a former national chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the founder of the Smitherman/Villanueva Scholarly Writing Retreat, designed for emerging scholars of color working on their first book in areas related to rhetoric, composition, language and literacy. He is the author of Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age and Race, Rhetoric and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, which was awarded the Computers and Composition 2007 Best Book Award. His most recent book is a collaborative effort with Keith Gilyard, On African American Rhetoric, published in 2018. He is currently working on a book project titled Funkentelechy: Rhetoric, Technologies, and Black Vernacular Cultures.