Rob Mills is a rhetorical scholar interested in law and American public culture. His current research examines how the rhetoric of maritime piracy, and its connections to international law and domestic politics, shaped attitudes towards sovereignty in the early-nineteenth-century United States. His book project, The Pirate and the Sovereign: Imagining the Rhetorical Limits of State Power, connects these pirate histories to contemporary conversations in the humanities and political theory concerning postsovereignty and sovereign violence.
His other research interests include the public function of institutional rhetorics (e.g., Supreme Court oral argument); foreign policy and international law in the Roberts Court; and contemporary rhetorical theory.
