Trey Conner earned his bachelor’s degree in English with honors at the University of Florida, completed both his Master’s degree and PhD in Rhetoric and Composition at Pennsylvania State University, and is an Associate Professor at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. His dissertation, "Remixing the Lost Book of Rhythm" engages technologies of communication, collaboration, and education, and pays special attention to the way writers today increasingly deploy digital and “musical” techniques such as sampling and mixing to share and transform information and ideas in ways that build communities and produce value. Taking p2p as a topos for the expanding classroom, this project narrates learning experiments initiated to test a simple premise: the interconnectivity of peer-to-peer networks of collaboration and exchange are fundamentally rhythmic and pedagogical practices. Research goals: forge community partnerships that create service learning opportunities, immerse students in the phenomenon of distributed wiki authorship, recover the neglected treatment of rhythm found in the classical Greek rhetorical tradition, and connect this treatment to rhetorical and philosophical writings informing and clustering around Hindustani and Carnatic musics.
Trey’s primary compositional interests converge on questions about distributed and collective writing, and he has gained much of his own compositional experience in networks of musical collaboration. Group improvising, engineering, filesharing, rehearsing and performing in sound directly informs and grows his research. Trey’s "dispersed" community, which includes Meringue, Leels, Flexxehawk, and Errant Strike, grew out numerous “geophysically bound” and mostly Florida-based projects. Separated by many states (NY, PA, FL, MD, TX), participants adapted technologies of filesharing as means for rehearsing and nurturing their sensus communis; the goal of this compositional practice is to share, arrange, and order sound in a way that creates further opportunities to pursue common ideas as this ideation converges in song structures. While teaching and completing his Master’s degree and Doctorate at Penn State, Trey initiated Pennsylvania-based sound projects including Peacefeather and the Order of the Silver Cosmonauts, who recruit new participants in the midst of live mixing and overdub performances at ice skating pavilions, radio stations, record stores, libraries, art galleries, and the Center for Sustainability at Penn State. These musical projects informed Trey’s methods and capacities in academic projects at the Leonhard Center Technical Writing Initiative, the Writing Center at Penn State, a fellowship in the Science, Medicine, Technology and Culture Group, and consulting work for the Lionshare peer-to-peer software development project at Penn State. Trey has shared his research at the Computers and Writing Conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society of America Conference, the Sweetland Writing Center, the Julian Woods Zendo, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Writing, the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing Conference, the Society for Ethnomusicology Conference, the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning of the NCTE, and the Modern Language Association Conference.
Publications include:
Interview: "NYPL Research Spotlight: Richard Doyle and Trey Conner" with Julie Carlsen, Assistant Curator, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, 2023.
Book chapter: "Post-Vital Prajnaparamita" co-authored with Richard Doyle, in the Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, Stefan Herbrechter et al. eds., 2022.
Article: "Dark Side of the Shroom? Erasing Indigenous and Counterculture Wisdoms with Psychedelic Capitalism and the Open Source Alternative: A Manifesto for Psychonauts," with Neşe Devenot and Richard Doyle, Anthropology of Consciousness special issue: current debates on sacred plants, August 2022.
Book Chapter: "I Say “Cat”, you Say “Cradle”: Ecstatic Signification and the Kitchen Songs of Avudai Akkal of Sengottai” co-authored with Richard Doyle, in Global Rhetorical Traditions, eds. Tarez Graban and Hui Wu, Parlor Press, September 2022.
Book Chapter: "The Resonance is the Composer" co-authored with Emma Hamilton, Amber Nicol, Chris Burton, Kathleen Olinger, Alyssa Harmon, and Ivan Herenchak-Jones, in Amplifying Soundwriting Pedagogies: Integrating Sound into Rhetoric and Writing,eds. Michael J. Faris, Courtney S. Danforth, and Kyle D. Stedman, WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado, 2022.
Book Chapter: “Chanting the Supreme Word of Information: Redundant!? Sacred?!,” co-authored with Richard Doyle, in Responding to the Sacred: an Inquiry into the Limits of Rhetoric, Michael Bernard-Donals & Kyle Jensen, eds., Penn State University Press, 2021.
Book Chapter: “Singing “Nan Yar?”: the Ecstatic Transmissions of Avudai Akkal and The Awakening of Ramana Maharshi” co-authored with Richard Doyle, in The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, ed. Keith Lloyd, Routledge Publishers, Abington, UK, July 2020.
Co-editor (with Rebecca Pope-Ruark, Jason Tham, and Joe Moses): Journal of Business and Technical Communication special issue: “Design-thinking Approaches in Technical and Professional Communication,” Sage Publishing, 2019.
Book: Looking Upside Down at Nothing: the Now Longer Lost Papers of Swami Blahblahananda, with Richard Doyle and many, many others. Metanoia Press, 2019.
Book Chapter: “You Can’t Step Into the Same Network Twice: Community Literacy, Client-Based Communication, and the Evolution of Networked (Re)Publics” with Morgan Gresham and Jill McCracken. in Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Community Partnerships: Concepts, Models, and Practices, Melody Bowdon and Russell Carpenter, eds., IGI Global academic publishers, 2011.
Article: “Open-Source Communities in Technical Writing: Local Exigence, Global Extensibility,” with Morgan Gresham and Jill McCracken, in the Journal for Technical Writing and Communication special issue on open source technology, 2011.
Electronic Book: Wyrd to the Wiki: Lacunae Toward Wiki Ontologies. Liquid Books Series of the Open Humanities Press, 2010.
Online pedagogical tool and textbook: “MyCompWiki” online invention adjunct for Pearson's mycomplab. Pearson Publishing, 2009-11.
Article: “Emboldened Linking.” Kairos/Praxis, Summer 2007 issue.
Recent presentations:
Presentation: ““License to Fil: Chanting Irish for Inclusion,” American Conference for Irish Studies, St. Petersburg, FL, October 26-8, 2023
Presentation: “Making the Marlinspike Mudra,” Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Baltimore, MD, May 26-29, 2022
Presentation: “Shut up and Chant: Hacking the I with Global Rhetorical Traditions,” CCCC Global Rhetorics SIG sponsored panel, Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, Illinois, March 9-12, 2022
Invited speaker: discussion panel after premiere staging of “Beat Generation By Jack Kerouac: Stage Reading With All-Female Cast” directed by Skyler Lukey. studio@620, March 30th 2021.
Guest panelist: Pull My Daisy screening and discussion. Green Light Cinema March 13th, 2021
Guest panelist: Kerouac Book Club's Satori in Paris event. Wordier Than Thou's WordPlay Festival, October 15th-18th, 2020.
Workshop: “Codesigning a Food Forest.” Enoch Davis Center, St. Petersburg FL, November 11, 2019.
Workshop: “Soundwriting in the Composition Classroom: Why and How.” 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Pittsburgh, PA, March 13-17, 2019.
Roundtable: “Ancient and Contemporary Embodied Rhetorical Performances on the Global Stage.” 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Pittsburgh, PA, March 13-17, 2019.
Presentation: “A Chorus of Data.” Symposium on Sound, Rhetoric, and Writing. Belmont University, Nashville, TN/Middle Tennessee State, Murfreesborough, TN. September 6-9, 2018.
Showcase: Youth Critical Literacy Collective. TASCO Talent Show, Frank Pierce Recreation Center St. Petersburg, FL, August 1, 2018.
Radio broadcast: “South Side St. Pete and the Enoch Davis Youth Farm” roundtable on The Closing Argument, WTMP 97.5 FM/1150 AM, Tampa, FL, July 21, 2018
Workshop and presentation: “Enoch Davis Youth Farm” Child's Park Family Fun Day, Child's Park YMCA, St. Petersburg, FL. June 9th, 2018.
“Agile Methods, Distributed Play, Response-able Practice.” 68th Annual Convention Conference on College Composition and Communication. Portland, Oregon, March 15-18, 2017.
“Redistributed Authority: Hacking and Tracking the Rhetorics of Cultural Property.” 60th Annual Society for Ethnomusicology Pre-Conference Symposium: “Music, Property, and Law.” December 2nd, 2015.
“Impermaculture.” 29th Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference and Art Exhibition: After Biopolitics. Rice University, November 12-15, 2015.
Presentation and Workshop: “Laya, Dissolution, and Decomposition: Gestures of Dialogue and Resilience.” 21st Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning of the NCTE. Estes Park, CO, June 18-21, 2015.
“Ancient Intertwingling.” 16th Biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference, Marriott Rivercenter, San Antonio, TX, May 22-26, 2014.
“Mechanizing the Initial Conditions: the Generative Potential of Game Mechanics.” Computer and Writing 2013: Mechanization and Writing. Frostburg State University, June 6-9, 2013.
“From Flashmobs to Freedom.” 15th Biennial Rhetoric Society of America Conference: Re/framing Identifications. Philadelphia, PA, May 25-28, 2012.
“Periecho: Tuning in to the Cicadas, Dancing with the Phaedrus.” 25th Annual Conference for the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts: Pharmakon. Kichener, Ontario, September 22-25, 2011.
“Syntonic Rhetoric: Expanding the Composition Zone.” Computers and Writing 2011: Writing in Motion. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, May 19-22, 2011.
Current projects include:
serving and participating in the editorial sangha at Metanoia Press (ongoing), two book projects (A Tapestry of Earthly Eloquence and Nowhere Else But Now Here), The Zebrapedia Crowdscription Engine (a site devoted to the ongoing transcription, annotation, discussion and editing of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis), working with the USFSP Urban Agriculture group and the Open Partnership Education Network, partnering with the Neighborhood News Bureau, Watch Me Grow in Bartlett Park, and the City of St. Pete Planning and Developing Department, working member of the St. Pete Youth Farm vision team and Steering Committee, faculty advisor to the USFSP Garden Club and Food Forest and Korean Pop Music Club, (ongoing) participation in Floridian scene-based musical/poetic practices with USFSP's A Writer's Club, Flexxehawk, N.A.T.U.R.E, Teacher Teacher, Soapbox Soliloquy and the Sonnets, Ananda, and others.
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