UAH professor Clarke Rountree publishes first book in Rhetoric, Law & the Humanities series

Dr. Clarke Rountree, Chair and Professor of Communication Arts at UAH, has published his first book in the "Rhetoric, Law & the Humanities" series.

Michael Mercier | UAH

Rhetoric, Law, & the Humanities , a new book series edited by Dr. Clarke Rountree, Chair and Professor of Communication Arts at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), recently published its first book, Drone Warfare and Lawfare in a Post-Heroic Age by Marouf A. Hasian, Jr.

The book series was created last year with The University of Alabama Press. Rhetoric, Law, & the Humanities, seeks to publish scholarship that examines law through a rhetorical lens.

"Dr. Hasian is the leading scholar in rhetoric and law, so I'm proud to have him open the series with this publication," said Rountree. Hasian is Professor of Communication at The University of Utah.

According to The University of Alabama Press, "Hasian has written a landmark study, illuminating both the discursive and visual argumentative strategies that drone supporters and critics both rely on. He comprehensively reviews how advocates and detractors parse and re-contextualize drone images, casualty figures, government 'white papers,' NGO reports, documentaries, and blogs to support their points of view. He unpacks the ideological reflexes and assumptions behind these legal, ethical, and military arguments."

Rountree said books in the series will come from a variety of fields, among them communication studies, law, English, sociology, and other fields that use rhetoric as a perspective to study trials, appellate court decisions, constitutions, legal processes, judges and judicial decision making, the intersection between law and society, and the construction of law in popular media (television, film, and websites) as it shapes expectations about the law, its processes, and public memory.

Rountree noted that four other books are under review and several others are in the proposal stage.