Dr. Landes brings his backgrounds in academia, industry, and the performing arts into his teaching and research on communication. He has taught 20 different courses in rhetoric, media, argument, and communication. His years as a freelance jazz drummer flavor his pedagogies, bringing improvisation, performance, and students’ personal voice into his curricula. He developed a collection of "argument sports" from his classes and published them in the best-selling book on rhetoric and argument, Thank You for Arguing (Jay Heinrichs, Random House). As a consultant, he helped teach applied humanities courses at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Science, Technology and Society. Beyond the university, Landes has taught sessions for Royal Dutch Shell, TEDx, Carnegie Mellon University’s Public Communication for Researchers Group, and the Pennsylvania Governor's Office of Citizen Service. Aiding these endeavors, Dr. Landes researches the problem of attention by focusing on attention’s qualitative-humanistic aspects overlooked by scientific discourses. He specifically looks at how public phenomena (e.g. culture, technology) mingle with private phenomena (e.g. individual meaning-making) to create one’s repertoire of possible attentions. From this perspective, the humanities are access points into the socio-historical construction of attention, and communication is an adaptive process for solving attentional problems. Landes’ recent dissertation, The Attention Situation: A Rhetorical Theory of Attention for Mediated Communication, developed a meta-theoretical framework for how humanistic disciplines can be applied to discover the available means of attention in any situation. His dissertation and conference papers explore case studies from antiquity and modernity in order to theorize principles of attention formation. A Silicon Valley native, Landes has worked for startups and consulted for 10 years. He has worked with first-to-market internet startups (Friendster and an online CPR certifying service), entrepreneurial ventures (a small business accelerator and an experimental college), marketing and design firms, and has accepted 40 invitations for guest speaking. Landes’ artistic background enlivens these ventures with the spirit of the arts. He has performed in 60 musical ensembles ranging from jazz, Salsa, punk, rock, Brazilian samba, soul, and Nigerian highlife. Landes was commissioned to compose and produce music for 10 films for UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Film and Media. Accompanying improvisational dancers, leading a house band for a lounge, and performing music for silent films are but a few sources of the performativity driving Landes’ research on attention and teaching of communication. New to Dubai, he is happily teaching, researching, and looking for novel projects in the region.

Rhetorical Studies, Media Studies, Communication Theory, Cultural Studies, Attention, Improvisation, Argument.