About Samuel Mccormick

Samuel McCormick is Professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University and was recently appointed EURIAS & Marie-Curie Research Fellow at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark.  He came to SFSU in 2012, after serving as Assistant Professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication, Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Political Science, and Codirector of the Philosophy & Communication Doctoral Program at Purdue University.  Prior to this, he was a Presidential Fellow in Communication Studies at the University Iowa, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2007. 

Professor McCormick is interested in communication, social theory, and the practice of everyday life, especially as these topics intersect with broader issues in intellectual and cultural history.  He is particularly interested in psychoanalytic theory and technique, the history and philosophy of animals, mathematical approaches to language and social interaction, and the sociopragmatics of sense and sexuality in the digital age, where pleasure is often mistaken for enjoyment and fantasy routinely misconstrued as love.  

His first book, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals, won the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression, the James A. Winans - Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, and the Everett Lee Hunt Award.  His second book, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk, was recently published by the University of Chicago Press, with an Italian translation to be published later this year.

Professor McCormick is currently at work on two new book projects: one on animal philosophy and another on Lacanian psychoanalysis.  He is also the host of Lectures on Lacan, a newsletter, podcast, and lecture series dedicated to clear, coherent, and accessible readings of key texts in Lacanian psychoanalysis.