Shannon Bow O'Brien

I am a presidency scholar who focuses on rhetoric. My first book looks at the locations of presidential speeches. In other words, do location choices help better inform us about priorities and decisions of administrations? I have published 3 books.

My first book, Why Presidential Speech Locations Matter: Analyzing Speechmaking from Truman to Obama (2018), examines the impact and importance of where presidents choose to speak.

My 2020 book, Donald Trump and the Kayfabe Presidency: Professional Wrestling Rhetoric in the White House, examines how Donald Trump uses professional wrestling language in the presidency to help sway the public. He uses wrestling tactics to craft manufactured realities that emphasize his worldview.

My 2024 book is Eugenics in American Political Life: How the Politics of Superiority Still Shape Us Today. From the book blurb, here's what this book is about: Shannon Bow O’Brien charts the foundations of the ideas, significant influences, and influencers of the movement in the last 19th and early 20th centuries. She discusses how these ideals and social life shaped American culture and encouraged attitudes toward racial and ethnic biases, including immigration policies in that period. O’Brien examines how the founding of the United States of America was built on unwanted individuals from the United Kingdom; transported felons and indentured servants were many of the original colonists. As the population forged its new nation, many of these individuals were the focus of restrictive immigration policies that sought to amend the identity of the American citizen and sought to define acceptable roles for Black persons within American society. Faithful slave monuments provided physical models to help engrain these roles within American life. O’Brien traces the development of the Mammy statue movement and its intersectionality with the restrictive immigration laws. Finally, she turns to the rhetoric of Donald Trump and contextualizes his speech in the ideology of the superiority of White Nordic nativism within American life.

I teach American Politics, American Presidency, Social Movements, Politics and Film, and Urban Politics. My work tends to have a strong American Political Development vibe (simply put, politics and history) with a focus upon how government and policy are impacted by choices. I'm very interested in how individuals impact systems.