This volume takes up rhetorical approaches to our primarily linguistic understanding of how names work, considering how theories of materiality in rhetoric enrich conceptions of the name as word or symbol and help explain the processes of name bestowal, accumulation, loss, and theft. Contributors theorize the formation, modification, and recontexualization of names as a result of technological and cultural change, and consider the ways in which naming influences identity and affects/grants power.

Star Medzerian Vanguri is an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Communication at Nova Southeastern University. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and rhetoric, and her research interests include stylistics, onomastics, spatial rhetorics, and classroom writing assessment. She is co-editor of The Centrality of Style (WAC Clearinghouse/Parlor Press, 2013). Her work has also appeared in Rhetoric Review and the Journal of Writing Research.

Introduction: Toward a Rhetorical Onomastics Star Medzerian Vanguri SECTION 1: Performing Identity 1 Composing Place, Composing Las Vegas Cydney Alexis, Scot Barnett, and Eric Leake 2 From "Big Time" to "Turd Blossom": George W. Bush and the Rhetoric of the Political Sobriquet Jason Thompson 3 Nominal Blackness Lisa Woolfork 4 "Mononymous" Dickens: The Named and Unnamed in Household Words Christine DeVinne SECTION 2: Reinforcing Hegemony 5 Understanding the Life Narratives of Immigrants through Naming Practices Angela Clark-Oates, Duane Roen, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson 6 "Don't Say Drone": Hits and Misses in a Rhetorical Project of Naming Robin Shoaps and Sarah Stanley 7 Crimean (Tatar): Resisting a Deportation of Identity Christian Berry 8 The Female Frankenstein: Naming Practices Constructing What It Means to Be a "Woman" Jessica Rose Corey SECTION 3: Creating Public Memory 9 Social Movement Names and Global Frames Tim Jensen 10 Eponymous Elixirs: Mrs. Pinkham, Nineteenth-Century Patent Medicines, and the Rhetoric of Naming Elizabeth Lowry 11 The Genome, the Meme, and the Teme Go off the Map: Observing Naming, Metaphor, and Circulation in Three Contested Terms David Bedsole 12 #Jan25: The Naming of an Event Katherine Bridgman