[1] Previously, he earned his second PhD at EGS under the title "Chaste Rape: Sexual Violence, Canon Formation, and Rhetorical Cultures" (director, Wolfgang Schirmacher; readers, Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben).
In 1978 and 1979, Vitanza received a National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship-in-Residence to work with Richard Emerson Young at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) on the topic of "Rhetorical Invention".
Other participants included Sharon Bassett, James A. Berlin, Lisa Ede, David Fractenberg, Robert P. Inkster, Charles Kneupper, Sam Watson Jr., Vickie Winkler, and William Nelson.
The month-long archived discussions hosted a range of figures from rhetoric and composition and elsewhere including Noam Chomsky, Jane Gallop, Sharon Crowley, and Geoffrey Sirc.
Vitanza's efforts are to reread and rewrite questions and concepts raised by such theorists and historians as Gilles Deleuze, Samuel Ijsseling, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-François Lyotard.