Earl Brooks is a musician and Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities, and he teaches courses in sound studies, African American rhetorical traditions, media literacy, rhetorical theory, and composition. His book, On Rhetoric and Black Music (Wayne State University Press, African American Life Series, June 2024), examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse. Brooks argues that there would have been no Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Arts Movement as we know these phenomena without Black music. His work also appears in Sounding Out!, Rhetoric Review, Journal for the History of Rhetoric, Langston Hughes Review, and College Composition and Communication. Brooks is a recent winner of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) Early Career Excellence Award and a recipient of the CAHSS Dean’s Research Fund, the Dresher Center Residential Faculty Research Fellowship, and the Humanities Teaching Lab Course Transformation Support Grant. Brooks is also a proud alumnus of the Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program, and he serves as a UMBC McNair Faculty Mentor and advisory board member. Brooks also serves on the executive board of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) as a representative of the CCCC Black Caucus.
Education
B.A. Music Performance (Saxophone), University of Kansas (2010)
B.A. American Studies, University of Kansas (2010)
M.A. African American Literature, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2012)
PH.D. Rhetoric and Composition, The Pennsylvania State University (2017)
He can be reached at: earlb@umbc.edu
