Paul Turpin

Teaching at Pacific from 2007 to 2019, Dr. Turpin taught in all three of the Pacific Seminars, Communication courses on media and contemporary culture, undergraduate and graduate courses in public advocacy, and the senior capstone.

Having turned to an academic career relatively later in life to pursue his interest in rhetoric and moral argument, Dr. Turpin’s doctoral dissertation from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (2005) examined moral claims in the economic arguments of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, winning two awards in the Communication discipline. This work was expanded into The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought (Routledge 2011), recipient of a national book award in the Communication discipline.

Dr. Turpin’s continuing research agenda is on how the moral worldviews of political ideologies comprise rhetorical resources for their respective viewpoints, and the latest iteration of his research explores the connections between speech act theory and rhetorical theory in an effort to illuminate the ideological functions of a variety of communication phenomena, including behaviors like hate speech and revenge porn, and other similar phenomena of online communication.