Faculty Spotlight

Adam Banks: Professor, Graduate School of Education

Professor Adam Banks in a headshot with a white button up shirt

Professor Banks takes a different approach.

Even on his Stanford profile, Adam Banks describes himself as the following: "Committed teacher. Midnight Believer. A Slow Jam in a Hip Hop world. My scholarship lies at the intersections of writing, rhetoric and technology issues; my specialized interests include African American rhetoric, community literacy, digital rhetorics and digital humanities."

Adam Banks brings a crucial perspective to Stanford, his accolades and current projects showcase this.

His recent awards include the St. Clair Drake Teaching Excellence Award from AAAS in 2017 and 2018, and he was named a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education in 2020. His latest book is a 2018 collaboration with Keith Gilyard, On African American Rhetoric, published with Routledge.

His current book project follows the line of inquiry of his ever popular STS capstone course, STS 200N: Funkentelechy: Technologies, Social Justice and Black Vernacular Cultures with a slightly different title: Funkentelechy: Rhetorics, Technologies and Black Vernacular Cultures. 

His capstone course, STS 200N, is more popular than ever.

While STS capstones normally rotate annually, STS 200N has been offered consecutively the last four years  and is always at max capacity.  The ExploreCourses description written by Professor Banks states, "From texts to techne, from artifacts to discourses on science and technology, this course is an examination of how Black people in this society have engaged with the mutually consitutive relationships that endure between humans and technologies. We will focus on these engagements in vernacular cultural spaces, from storytelling traditions to music and move to ways academic and aesthetic movements have imagined these relationships. Finally, we will consider the implications for work with technologies in both school and community contexts for work in the pursuit of social and racial justice." It's no wonder the course is always full. In addition, he's advised countless STS students, STS honors students, and is a pivotal part of the Science, Technology, and Society program.

We are shining a light on Professor Adam Banks. Committed teacher. Midnight Believer. A Slow Jam in a Hip Hop world.