Creativity is a problematic that connects two of my core research areas. As a historian of ideas, I am concerned with conceptual innovation—its nature, the conditions under which it thrives, and the ways in which it spreads. As a historian and theorist of rhetoric, I am particularly interested in the first part of classical rhetoric, invention, and the afterlife of its primary engine—the art of topics. At the intersection of these two areas, one finds the tremendous historicity of infrastructures for thinking. The reinvention of ancient topics in contemporary topic modeling is but one example, but it is a radical one transposing between oral and computational domains.