Omri is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. His CV can be found on this page, on his academic blog Icon Index Symbol.

Omri’s academic specializations are listed below, with links going to the relevant categories on Icon Index Symbol. He has presented tens of papers these topics at national and international conferences, and he continues to review articles for academic journals such as the International Journal of Communication:

• Rhetorical Theory
• Argumentation and the Public Sphere
• American Pragmatism
• Rhetoric of Science
• Psychoanalytic Critical Theory
• Digital Journalism and New Media

Omri’s dissertation revolves around political conspiracy theories considered rhetorically, psychoanalytically, and sociologically. It surveys various models of discursively-constituted identity – Burkean, Lacanian, and Habermasian – and argues that conspiracy theories do their persuasive work by appealing to identity rather than via other sorts of appeals.

Before coming to USC, Omri taught undergraduate computer science labs on C++ and Java at the University of Pittsburgh. As an instructor at USC Annenberg from 2005 to 2009, he designed and taught undergraduate courses on the history of rhetoric, on argumentation theory, and on public speaking. He also helped design graduate-level seminars on argumentation theory and on the rhetoric of science. As part of USC’s Continuing Education And Summer Programs, he spent two summers teaching college-level argumentation theory to at-risk high school students.

Omri was involved in intercollegiate policy debate both as an undergraduate debater and as a coach. From 2002 to 2008 he helped coach teams first from Dartmouth College and then from USC. On the high school level, he spent five summers as a lab instructor at the Dartmouth Debate Institute and a couple of years as an assistant coach for Damien High School. From 2003 to 2006 he co-directed USC’s high school debate tournaments.