James Kastely is department chair and professor of English at the University of Houston in Texas. He is the author of Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (Yale, 1997), The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion (Chicago, 2015) and Loving the World Appropriately: Persuasion and the Transformation of Subjectivity (Chicago, 2022).