We’re pleased that colleagues from so many of the nation’s leading programs of rhetorical scholarship have agreed to present their work at the 2014 conference.  Confirmed presenters and respondents include:

Robert Asen, University of Wisconsin, Professor of Rhetoric, Politics and Culture, conducts research and teaches in the areas of public policy debate, public sphere studies, and rhetoric and critical theory. Asen focuses on the ways that political, economic, and cultural inequalities interact with relations of power to shape public discourse. He considers how powerful individuals and groups use discourse to maintain their privilege and how marginalized people seek to overcome exclusions to represent their needs, interests, and identities in the public sphere. Asen understands discourse as an ameliorative social force that may build community and promote justice as well as an oppressive force that may divide people and perpetuate cruelty. Asen has received the Daniel Rohrer Research Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Argumentation (American Forensics Association), the NCA RCT New Investigator Award, the NCA Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the NCA Nichols Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Public Address, and the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in Rhetorical Criticism. His books include Counterpublics and the State (a volume he edited for SUNY Press in 2001), Visions of Poverty: Welfare Policy and Political Imagination (Michigan State UP 2002), Invoking the Invisible Hand: Social Security and the Privatization Debates (Michigan State UP 2009), and Public Modalities (co-edited for the University of Alabama Press in 2010). In August 2014, the National Communication Association announced that its Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division had named Asen the winner of its 2014 Distinguished Scholar Award.

Vanessa Beasley, Vanderbilt University, is Associate Professor of Communication Studies. Her scholarship focuses on presidential rhetoric, U.S. political communication, rhetorical criticism and theory. Beasley directs the Vanderbilt University Program in Career Development and edits the presidential rhetoric book series for Texas A&M University Press. She has won teaching awards from the University of Georgia, Southern Methodist University, Texas A&M, and the Southern States Communication Association. Her books include Who Belongs in America: Presidents, Rhetoric, and Immigration (which she co-edited for Texas A&M UP in 2006) and You, the People: American National Identity in Presidential Rhetoric (Texas A&M UP 2004).

Jeffrey Bennett, University of Iowa, is Associate Professor of Communication Studies. Bennett recently published his first book, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (University of Alabama Press). This analysis, which places contemporary rhetorical theory in conversation with identity and movement studies, focuses on the federal donor deferral policies that prohibit gay men from giving blood. Although organizations such as the FDA purport to secure public safety through a scrupulous deliberative process, Bennett argues these measures are substantiated by a deleterious scientific discourse that positions gay men as contagions. As a remedy, queer men have responded by quietly donating blood and verbally protesting in the ritual site. These practices underscore the constitutive, vernacular, and discursive modalities of citizenship, illustrating that civic identity rests not in the prescribed normativities of institutions, but the quotidian lives of social actors. In addition to the book, Bennett’s work has also appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Text and Performance Quarterly, the Journal of Homosexuality, and the Southern Communication Journal. Prof. Bennett’s current research project, tentatively titled “Critical Conditions: Diabetes and the Management of the Human Body,” is a continuation of his work completed on the relationship between blood symbolism, public policy, and the cultural construction of citizenship. “Critical Conditions” investigates the trope of “management” employed by institutions to regulate and discipline the bodies of people with diabetes. The National Communication Association has named Bennett the recipient of the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award.

Barbara Biesecker, University of Georgia, is Professor and Head of the Department of Communications Studies at the University of Georgia. Throughout her career, Biesecker has explored the role of rhetoric in social change by working at the intersections of rhetorical theory and criticism and continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and criticism, and cultural studies. She has long been preoccupied, in other words, with the question of rhetorical agency. What exactly is rhetorical agency? Where is it/might it be located? What are its conditions of (im)possibility? Provisional theoretical answers to these questions come in the form of a book wherein she reads in Kenneth Burke’s theory of rhetoric a theory of social change, an essay on Derridean deconstruction as a theory of rhetorical invention, another essay that reads Foucault’s work on style as a theory of resistance, another that reads Cixous’s manifesto for a feminist theory of rhetorical agency, and most recently, one edited volume (with John Lucaites) on rhetoric, materiality and politics as well as a theorization of evental rhetoric that finds considerable resources in Lacan. Recent work that tackles the complexities of rhetorical agency by engaging particular instances in which it appears to be at work are essays addressing the politics of WWII remembrance at the end of the 20th century and the politics of 9/11 and the War on Terror today.  Biesecker is the recipient of the National Communication Association’s 2007 Douglas Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award, the 2011 John I. Sisco Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2013 Francine Merritt Award. She was inducted into the University of Georgia Teaching Academy in 2013. Professor Biesecker currently serves as the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and she continues to serve on the editorial boards of Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and the University of Alabama’s Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique book series.

Leah Ceccarelli, University of Washington, is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a rhetorical critic and theorist whose research focuses on interdisciplinary and public discourse about science, as well as metacritical issues surrounding rhetorical inquiry as a mode of research. Over the years, she has received the National Communication Association’s Golden Monograph Award (for “Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism”), the Rhetoric Society of America’s Book Award (for Shaping Science with Rhetoric), and the American Forensics Association’s Daniel Rohrer Memorial Outstanding Research Award (for “Manufactured Scientific Controversy: Science, Rhetoric and Public Debate”). Her most recent book is On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation (Michigan State University Press, 2013). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American Public Address, Public Debate, Rhetorical Criticism, Classical Rhetoric, and Rhetoric of Science. At the University of Washington, she helps coordinate the Science Studies Network and serves on the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate. She is on the editorial boards of Rhetoric & Public Affairs and Philosophy & Rhetoric, is Vice Chair-Elect of the Public Address Division of the National Communication Association, serves on the Publications Committee of the Western States Communication Association, and is Co-Editor of the new book series, Transdisciplinary Rhetoric, sponsored by the Rhetoric Society of America and Penn State University Press.

Catherine Chaput is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno where she teaches courses in rhetoric theory and criticism as well as core writing and core humanities courses. Her research focuses on the relationship between rhetoric and political economy as it manifests within particular social, cultural, and political texts. Her monograph, Inside the Teaching Machine, was published with the University of Alabama Press’s series in Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique. Her collection, Entertaining Fear, was published in Peter Lang’s Frontiers in Political Communication series. She has published articles on rhetoric and political economy in various journals and is currently working on a monograph, titled Capitalism and Our Affective Investments, that chronicles key economic debates through the rhetorical lens of affect.

Karma Chavez, University of Wisconsin, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and affiliate faculty in the Program in Chican@ and Latin@ Studies. She is co-editor of Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (SUNY Press, 2012) and author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013). Her research explores the relationships among race, class, gender, sexuality, nation and immigration utilizing queer of color theory, women of color feminism and rhetorical criticism. Additionally, Chavez interested in social movement building, activist rhetoric, coalitional politics, and the rhetorical practices and discursive constitutions of marginalized groups. Prof. Chavez was a visiting scholar at the Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, and is also the co-founder of the Queer Migration Research Network, with Eithne Luibhéid. Alongside other academic pursuits, Chavez works with various grassroots queer, immigrant and social justice organizations and collectives, and hosts 89.9 FM WORT’s lunch hour program, A Public Affair, every other Wednesday.

Josue David Cisneros, University of Illinois, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. He holds an affiliate appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies. His research focuses on rhetorics of social and political identities, with particular emphasis on issues such as citizenship, race/ethnicity, Latina/o identity, and immigration. David has published studies on governmental rhetoric, political campaigns, and mass media about immigration and Latina/o communities as well as research examining the rhetorical strategies of grassroots, social protest movements and ethnic minorities. His research has appeared in journals such as Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Argumentation & Advocacy, Communication Quarterly, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. His book “The Border Crossed Us”: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity was published with the University of Alabama Press in 2013. He is the recipient of the 2010 Daniel Rohrer Memorial Outstanding Research Award (from the American Forensics Association), the 2012 Wrage-Baskerville Award (from the National Communication Association’s Public Address Division), and the 2013 Article of the Year Award from the Eastern Communication Association. David teaches courses in the areas of rhetorical theory and criticism and public advocacy, including “Social Movement Communication,” “Argumentation,” and “Contemporary Rhetorical Theory.” Prior to teaching at Illinois, he taught at Northeastern University and at the University of Georgia, where he received his Ph.D. in Speech Communication in 2009.

Lisa Corrigan, University of Arkansas, is an Associate Professor of Communication, Director of the Gender Studies Program, and Affiliate Faculty in both African & African American Studies and Latin American Studies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on the relationship between the Black Power movement in the United States and the Cuban Revolution via the prison writings of movement activists. Her writings have appeared in Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Women & Language, Communication Quarterly, The National Journal of Urban Education and Practice, The Journal of Post-Colonial Writing (forthcoming), and Intertexts (forthcoming). A book tentatively titled, Prison Power: How Prison Politics Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation is under contract with the University of Alabama Press in its “Rhetoric, Culture and Social Critique” series.

Leroy Dorsey, University of Memphis, Professor and Chair of Communication, examines the symbols used by political figures to promote their legislative agendas, shape their identities as morally sound advocates, and transform their audiences into seemingly active agents poised to support particular agendas. He studies the public speech of the presidency, most notably the rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt and, to a lesser extent, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and others. His book, We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism, examines how Roosevelt used the frontier myth of national origin to create standards for non-whites and immigrants to achieve before they could be identified as Americans. That book won the 2008 National Communication Association Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for the top book in public address studies. His research has been published in such journals as Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Presidential Studies Quarterly. Dr. Dorsey is a contributor to African American Orators and Communicating Marginalized Masculinities: Identity Politics in TV, Film, and New Media, and edited The Presidency and Rhetorical Leadership.

Pat Gehrke, University of South Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Speech Communication and Rhetoric Program and the Department of English. He has published original research in communication ethics, public argument, political rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and philosophy of communication, including his 2009 book, The Ethics and Politics of Speech. His score of articles, essays, and book chapters are frequently cited in communication, argumentation, and rhetorical studies. Currently he is serving as editor of Review of Communication, a journal of the National Communication Association. He has made over sixty presentations and appearances at conferences in the United States and Europe on topics such as argumentation theory, methodology in the study of public rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical theory, communication ethics, and philosophies of communication. Professor Gehrke’s latest research on democracy, dissent, and public rhetoric is supported by a National Science Foundation grant focused on public engagement methods. In pursuing the question of how democratic action might be possible in twenty-first century America he has developed innovative methodologies for empirical and rhetorical study of public argument and public engagement while retaining a strong ethical and philosophical foundation. That combination provides for the development of grounded middle-range theories that are at once theoretically sophisticated, based on actual field observation, and practically functional. His record of teaching includes courses in rhetorical theory, persuasion, rhetoric of science and technology, rhetoric and democracy, civic engagement, communication ethics, history of rhetoric, argumentation, and communication pedagogy. Professor Gehrke holds a Ph.D. in Communication Arts and Sciences from The Pennsylvania State University. He has served on the board of directors of the Rhetoric Society of America, the steering committee of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric, as chair of the National Communication Association’s Communication Ethics Division, co-founded the Southern States Communication Association’s Ethics and Philosophy of Communication division, and is an active member of the Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCOST) project at North Carolina State University.

G. Thomas Goodnight, University of Southern California, is Professor of Communication. Before joining Annenberg, Goodnight taught doctoral courses in Northwestern University’s Rhetoric Program in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, Criticism, Argumentation, and the Public Sphere. Having directed 28 dissertations, he has been accorded career awards in Rhetoric and Communication Theory by the NCA and been named among the five top scholars in argumentation of the last 50 years by the AFA. Additionally, Professor Goodnight has taught Organizational Communication at the Master’s level, and his undergraduate courses include seminars in the Rhetoric of War, Science Advocacy, Risk Communication, and an introduction to the field. A regular contributor to the Quarterly Journal of Speech, former editor of Argumentation and Advocacy, director of the 12th Alta Conference on Argumentation, Goodnight is a co-founder of the NU-University of Amsterdam graduate exchange. His current research interests include deliberation and postwar society, science communication, argument and aesthetics, public discourse studies, and communicative reason in controversy.

Joshua Gunn, University of Texas, is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Gunn’s research and teaching program focuses on the category of the ineffable, and in particular, how people use and abuse signs and symbols to negotiate ineffability. In this context, his attention to music, religion, and human affective experiences (e.g., love) are part of a deeper interest in the limits of human representation, self-understanding, and self-fashioning. Theoretically, Gunn’s teaching and scholarship are indebted to the work of Kenneth Burke, which eventually led him to take-up Marxism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. Gunn draws on psychoanalytic theory, especially that of Lacan, Freud, and Kristeva, for a useful vocabulary to help make sense of objects and experiences that are (at least seemingly) incommunicable. Gunn’s graduate teaching reflects these interests in terms of survey courses that work toward helping students become independent scholars. His graduate courses include Basic Rhetorical Criticism; The Idiom of Haunting (which is a survey of mourning, trauma, and memory studies); The Subject (which is a survey of subjectivity theory); Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis; and The Object (which is a survey of many disciplinary debates regarding methodology and object). At the graduate level, teaching professional practices is just as important as our readings, and in most of Gunn’s courses he integrates a strong professionalization component (e.g., mock journal submissions and peer review, practice conference papers, and so on). At the undergraduate Prof. Gunn focuses on “popular” objects and higher order, critical thinking skills. His course offerings at this level are also surveys. These include a core course on the history of rhetorical theory from the Sophists to Foucault; Rhetoric and Film; Rhetoric and Popular Music; Rhetoric and Religion; and Celebrity Culture, which is a course that actively investigates the contemporary locus of the political and civic engagement.

Ronald Walter Greene, University of Minnesota, Professor and Chair of Communication, began his nomadic undergraduate education with stays in Evanston, Illinois, Lexington, Kentucky, Columbia, South Carolina, and Taiyuan, People’s Republic of China before completing his B.A. in philosophy at the University of South Carolina (1986). During his senior year at the University of South Carolina he was elected to the University of South Carolina Debate Hall of Fame. He completed an MA at Louisiana State University (1988) specializing in rhetorical theory and political communication. From 1988 until 1990 he was the director of debate and held the rank of instructor at Middle Tennessee State University. From 1990-1995 he completed a Ph.D. in speech communication with areas of specialization in rhetorical studies, cultural studies, and critical/interpretive theory. From 1995-2001 he was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and in 2001 joined the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. In 2012, he was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Critical and Cultural Studies Division of the National Communication Association and became the Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. In 2013, he was promoted to the rank of Professor at the University of Minnesota and won the National Communication Association’s Charles H. Woolbert Research Award. His primary research investigates the ways different institutions regulate and advocate communication techniques and technologies to improve the political, cultural, and/or the economic welfare of populations. To that end, he focuses on how these institutions promote a need to improve the capacity to communicate and what kinds of communication are advanced as improvements. The purpose of this research is to better understand the power of communication to produce and regulate the human ability to live in common with others.

Roderick Hart, University of Texas at Austin, is Dean of the Moody College of Communication and the Shivers Chair in Communication. Hart received his B.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts and his M. A. and Ph. D. degrees from the Pennsylvania State University. His area of special interest is politics and the mass media and he is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why (University Of Chicago Press, 2013). He is also the author of DICTION 6.0, a computer program designed to analyze language patterns. Hart has delivered public lectures at more than eighty colleges and universities and received grant support from the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Exxon Foundation, Hatton Sumners Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, Dorot Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. A former Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Hart is listed in Who’s Who in America, the Directory of American Scholars, International Who’s Who in Education, and American Men and Women of Science. He was named a Research Fellow of the International Communication Association, a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association, and the National Scholar of the Year Award from Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, and has received the Graber Book Award and the Edelman Career Award from the American Political Science Association. Hart has been inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas and has also been designated Professor of the Year for the State of Texas from the Carnegie/C.A.S.E. Foundation. Previously he received the Eyes of Texas Student Involvement Award and the Texas Excellence Teaching Award from the University of Texas, the Excellence in Teaching Award in the Humanities from Purdue University, and the Outstanding Young Teacher Award from the Central States Communication Association. He has supervised over fifty graduate theses and dissertations.

J. Michael Hogan, Penn State University, is Liberal Arts Professor and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation. His work principally focuses on the character and quality of public deliberation, with specific research interests include political campaigns and social movements, foreign policy debates, presidential rhetoric, and public opinion and polling. Hogan’s books include The Panama Canal in American Politics (1986), The Nuclear Freeze Campaign (1994), Rhetoric and Community (1998), Rhetoric and Reform in the Progressive Era (2003), Woodrow Wilson’s Western Tour (2006), and The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address (2010). He has served on the editorial board of the Quarterly Journal of Speech under five different editors, and currently serves on the editorial board of Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Prof. Hogan is Principal Investigator, NEH Challenge Grant for Center for Democratic Deliberation, and has been often honored for the quality of his research, including the NCA Distinguished Scholar Award, the Douglas Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award, the Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, Golden Anniversary Prize Book Award, the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award, and the Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.

James Jasinski, University of Puget Sound, is Professor of Communication Studies. Jasinski received a General Studies undergraduate degree (concentration: Communication in the Arts) and an MA in Communication Studies from Northern Illinois University and a PhD in Communication Studies from Northwestern. Prof. Jasinski is a rhetorician whose teaching and research focuses on rhetorical criticism and public argument. He is best-known for his 2001 book Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (Sage). He has authored or co-authored over two dozen essays, monographs, and book chapters on such topics as Martin Luther King’s (1967) Riverside Church speech against the Vietnam war, Henry Highland Garnet’s (1843) “Address to the Slaves,” and language and voice strategies in The Federalist Papers. Jasinski has developed a new Writing and Rhetoric seminar on Constitutional Controversies. In the Communication Studies department, he regularly teaches courses in the Rhetoric of Law, Political Communication, African American Public Discourse, and Rhetorical Criticism; he also offers a course African Americans and Constitutional Law through the African American Studies program. Jasinski has served as an associate editor for four journals in rhetoric and communication and has been selected to serve as editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly. His editorship will run 2012-15.

John Lucaites, Indiana University, is Professor of Rhetoric and Culture, and holds adjunct appointments in the Honors College, American Studies, and Cultural Studies. He is a fellow at the Poynter Center for the Study of Ethics and American Institutions. Professor Lucaites was a Henry Rutgers Scholar in intellectual and cultural history at Rutgers College and earned his M.A. in speech communication at the University of North Carolina. His Ph.D. is from the University of Iowa in rhetoric and communication studies. His research concerns the relationship between rhetoric and social/political theory and focuses on the critique and reconstruction of liberal-democracy as it manifests itself in the socio-political practices of late modern U.S. public culture. His first book was a rhetorical history of the concept of “equality” in American political discourse. His most recent scholarship focuses on the relationship between rhetoric, citizenship, and visual culture, with particular attention to photojournalism as a mode of “public art” that underwrites liberal-democratic public culture. He is particularly interested in the relationship between visuality and the problem of socio-political judgment as it implicates the question “what does it mean to see and to be seen as a citizen.” He is the co-author of Crafting Equality: America’s Anglo-African Word (Chicago 1993), and No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago 2007); and co-editor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Sermonic Power of Public Discourse (Alabama 1993), Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader (Guilford 2000), and Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics (Peter Lang 2009). He is currently working on a manuscript on “Civic Spectatorship.” He served as the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech (2008-2010), and is the Senior Editor for a book series on “Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique” at the University of Alabama Press. He also co-hosts a weekly blog on rhetoric, visuality, and photojournalism: http://www.nocaptionneed.com. He has won numerous awards and is a three time recipient of the National Communication Association’s Golden Monograph Award (1997, 2002, 2004), as well as the Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address (2008) and the Diamond Anniversary Book Award (2008). In 2012 he was identified as a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association. He currently serves as the Associate Dean for Arts & Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Christian Lundberg, University of North Carolina, is Associate Professor of Communication Studies. His teaching and research interests include theories of the public and public discourse, public speaking, rhetorical theory, debate and deliberation, critical theory, and Cultural Studies. Dr. Lundberg also teaches the First Year Seminar “Think, Speak, Argue,” which focuses on debate and public speaking skills as pedagogical tools and as critical components of democratic life. Lundberg’s current research focuses on theories of the public as a social and discursive form, and on the animating principles for public discourses and identities. He is interested in these questions both at the level of theories of the public, and at the level of specific practices of public discourse. At the level of theories of the public, his current project and most recent book publication, Lacan in Public, works through the implications of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis for thinking the rhetorical character of publics as social formations and of the public discourses that circulate within them. In addition, he has written a number of pieces that unpack forms of discourse constituting specific publics, with special attention to the intersection between publics and religious discourse in Islam and Evangelical Christianity. At the level of specific practices of public discourse and pedagogy, Lundberg’s work focuses on rhetorical theory, and on debate and public speaking as critical democratic forms. He has authored or is in the process of writing a number of textbooks relating to rhetoric, public speaking, and public deliberation, including The Essential Guide to Rhetoric (Bedford St. Martins, 2007) and a textbook with Cengage Learning tentatively titled Public Speaking and Civic Engagment (forthcoming).

John Lynch, University of Cincinnati, is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the clinical research ethicist at the Center for Clinical and Translational Science and Training (CCTST). Broadly, his work focuses on the rhetorical and ethical aspects of biomedical technology, with a special emphasis on embryonic stem cell research and medical genomics. His first book, What are Stem Cells? Definition at the Intersection of Science and Politics, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2011. Lynch’s work has also appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Public Understanding of Science, American Journal of Bioethics-Primary Research, and Clinical Pediatrics, and his work on public and community engagement with genetics research has been supported by grants from the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the NIH’s Clinical and Translational Science Award network. His current research projects focus on the bioethical tropes publics use when considering issues around developing biotechnology and related policy.

John Lyne, University of Pittsburgh, is Professor of Communication and Director of Graduate Studies, with appointment as a resident fellow in the Center for the Philosophy of Science. Lyne studies philosophical and theoretical issues in rhetoric and communication, argumentation, and rhetoric of science. His work explores the ways that rhetoric mediates relationships between science, philosophy, and culture. He also teaches a graduate seminar on the rhetoric and philosophy of medicine in the M.A. program in Bioethics and Health Law. His published work appears in journals and edited volumes both inside and outside the field of communication, and he has been editor-in-chief for a book series on the rhetoric of inquiry. He has directed several national award-winning dissertations. Recent doctoral advisees have taken faculty positions at the University of Colorado, Temple University, Tulane University, and the Claremont Graduate University. Professor Lyne is the recipient of the 2010 Provost’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring, for his success at mentoring doctoral students.

Martin J. Medhurst, Baylor University, is Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric and Communication, and Professor of Political Science, at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He has held teaching positions at the University of California, Davis, and at Texas A&M University. His areas of specialization include presidential rhetoric, civil-religious discourse, and cold war rhetoric. He is the author or editor of 13 books and more than 90 articles and chapters in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary outlets. He is the founder and current editor of Rhetoric & Public Affairs, an interdisciplinary quarterly, and the founder and series editor of the “Rhetoric and Public Affairs” book series at Michigan State University Press. He has also served as a series editor at Texas A&M University Press and Baylor University Press. He is now in his 36th year of full-time university teaching.

Charles E. Morris, III, Syracuse University, is Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies. His research focuses on rhetorical criticism, GLBTQ rhetorics, public memory, and social protest. Among Morris’ recent book publications are: Jason Edward Black and Charles E. Morris III, eds., An Archive of Hope: Harvey Milk’s Speeches and Writings (California 2013); Morris and Stephen Howard Browne, eds, Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 3E (Strata 2013; Morris, ed., Remembering the AIDS Quilt (Michigan State 2011); Morris, ed., Queering Public Address: Sexualities in American Historical Discourse (South Carolina 2007), and others. Prof. Morris was an Inaugural Fellow at the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution, Waterhouse Institute for Social Justice of Villanova University, and Fielding University. He is recipient of the NCA Golden Anniversary Award (2010), the Randy Majors Award for Distinguished Scholarship in LGBTQ Studies (2008), won the ECA Past President’s Award (2008), and the NCA Golden Anniversary Monograph Award (2003). During the 2001-2002 academic year he was a Research Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities (Vanderbilt University).

John Murphy, University of Illinois, Associate Professor of Communication. Murphy’s research is concentrated on the rhetoric of the US presidency and contemporary politics, on presidential war rhetoric and campaign speeches. He’s interested in just how political languages collide and influence each other over the course of US history, is winner of the NCA Golden Anniversary Monograph Award and is a regular contributor to such select journals as Rhetoric & Public Affairs and Quarterly Journal of Speech. Prof. Murphy has written on John and Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Martin Luther King. Jr. and George W. Bush. He’s currently developing a monograph on Alexander Hamilton and a book project on John Kennedy and the American liberal tradition.

Catherine Palczewski, University of Northern Iowa, is a Professor of Communication Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies; she served as the UNI Director of Debate from 1994-2009. She teaches courses in rhetorical theory and criticism, the rhetoric and performance of social protest, argumentation, gender in communication, and political communication. She received her B.S., M.A, and Ph.D. from Northwestern University where she also competed in policy debate. She recently completed her term as co-editor for the American Forensic Association journal Argumentation and Advocacy. She received the Francine Merritt Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Lives of Women in Communication, the Iowa Regents Award for Faculty Excellence, the University of Northern Iowa College of Humanities and Fine Arts Faculty Excellence Award, the George Ziegelmueller Outstanding Debate Educator Award, and the Rohrer Award for the Outstanding Publication in Argumentation. In 2001, she was the keynote speaker at the AFA/NCA Biennial Conference on Argumentation, a conference she directed in 2013. She co-authored Communicating Gender Diversity (2nd ed., 2014), which was shortlisted for the International Gender and Language Book Prize in 2008, and Rhetoric in Civic Life (2012). Her work tends to focus on how marginalized groups rhetorically construct their messages to gain access to, and be legible in, the dominant public sphere. For a full list of her publications, and syllabi for the classes she teaches, see http://www.uni.edu/palczews

Shawn Parry-Giles, University of Maryland, is a Professor in the Department of Communication and the Director of the Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership. Parry-Giles’ research centers on the study of rhetoric and politics, with a focus on the study of the presidency. She is the author or co-author of four books: Hillary Clinton in the News: Gender and Authenticity in American Politics (in press); The Prime-Time Presidency: The West Wing and U.S. Nationalism (with Trevor Parry-Giles), Constructing Clinton (with Trevor Parry-Giles), and The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda, and the Cold War, 1945-1955 (designated as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2002). She also is the co-editor of two books: Public Address and Moral Judgment: Critical Studies in Ethical Tensions (with Trevor Parry-Giles) and The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address (with J. Michael Hogan). She has also published in such journals as Communication Monographs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Political Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. In addition, Parry-Giles is the co-editor of an NEH funded project and journal entitled the Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project (with J. Michael Hogan).

Angela Ray, Northwestern University, is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies. She studies and teaches rhetorical criticism and history, U.S. public address, and women’s public advocacy. Her scholarship has appeared in Argumentation and Advocacy, the Journal of Cultural Geography, Names, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, the Review of Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Women’s Studies in Communication. She has also contributed essays to various volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies and The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies. Her 2005 book, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States, examines the development of the U.S. popular lecture circuit and its connections with the formation of national identity and the propagation of social reform. This book won major awards from the National Communication Association, NCA’s Public Address Division, the Rhetoric Society of America, and the American Forensic Association. Her most recent published work, a chapter in Tom F. Wright’s edited collection, The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America (2013), characterizes the range of ways in which lyceum participants conceptualized the world and their place within it. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Crucibles of Civic Engagement: Popular Learning in the Antebellum Lyceum, which investigates the role of debating clubs, library companies, and other civic associations in relation to the changing dynamics of nationhood, regionalism, race, gender, and class.

Peter Simonson, University of Colorado, is Associate Professor of Communication. Prof. Simonson studies rhetoric and communication from historical, cultural, and philosophical perspectives, focusing particularly on the U.S. since the mid-nineteenth century. He teaches courses that reflect interdisciplinary interests in the history of thinking about and studying communication, contemporary rhetorical and social theory, pragmatism, media, religion, gender, and the ethnographically infused cultural study of rhetoric. Simonson has published research on these topics as well as the rhetorical history of mass communication, the history of the field of communication, rhetorics of moral and religious communities, eloquence across media environments, and the work of the sociologist Robert K. Merton. In addition to books and articles, Simonson has also helped produce two documentary films on the history of media research in the U.S. and a website with historical resources on the history of women in U.S. media research (www.outofthequestion.org). Simonson is author of Refiguring Mass Communication: A History (U Illinois P 2010, named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice in 2011), and has co-edited the Handbook of Communication History (Routledge 2013), Politics, Social Networks, and the History of Mass Communications Research: Re-Reading Personal Influence (Sage 2006), and Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key Texts 1920-1968 (Rowman & Littlefield 2004). Simonson has undertaken visiting scholar appoints at the University of California – Berkeley (2012) and the Universidad de Navarra (2009). In 2006 he delivered the Hitchcock Lecture at the University of Iowa.

Paul Stob, Vanderbilt University, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies. His research focuses on rhetoric and intellectual culture during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in America. He is especially interested in the way American intellectuals have used popular forums—lecture halls, periodicals, and books—to construct democratic communities of thought. His work has appeared in such journals as Rhetoric & Public Affairs, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Philosophy & Rhetoric, and Argumentation & Advocacy. His first book, William James & the Art of Popular Statement, is available from Michigan State University Press. He is currently writing a book on “intellectual populism,” a tradition of public engagement that sits at the intersection of rhetoric, politics, and knowledge creation.

Dave Tell, University of Kansas, is Associate Professor of Communication Studies. Tell’s work focuses on the intersections of rhetorical theory and cultural politics. His 2012 book Confessional Crises: Confession and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America (Penn State Press), which won the 2013 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award, explains how the genre of confession has shaped (and been shaped by) some of the twentieth century’s most intractable issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy. Dr. Tell teaches undergraduate courses in the history and theory of rhetoric and in American public discourse. At the graduate level, Dr. Tell offers courses in contemporary theory, the latter thought of Michel Foucault (1969-1984), rhetoric and spatial theory, public sphere theory, and public address. His work has been published in a number of national journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communication Studies,and Rhetorica.

Robert Terrill, Indiana University, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture. His work has focused on the rhetorical criticism of African American public address, and his book, Malcolm X: Inventing Radical Judgment (Michigan State University Press, 2004), earned the Kohrs-Campbell Prize in rhetorical criticism. He has written or co-written essays on the rhetoric of Stephen A. Douglas, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Stokely Carmichael, and Barack Obama. He also has published a few essays on film, including two on Batman movies and one on the political documentary film Unprecedented.

Eric King Watts, University of North Carolina, is Associate Professor of Media and Technology Studies. Dr. Watts’ research explores the manner in which public voice is invented, performed, consumed, and suppressed. This fundamental question constituting his research program extends into literary studies, aesthetics, and critical media studies. In particular, Dr. Watts examines the diverse phenomena of African American public voice and its relation to the representation of the black body, the meanings of blackness, the shape of civic culture and community; voice and voicelessness are understood as being impacted by the rhetorical agency of the subject, the terms of one’s publicity, and the power relations that make up one’s various identities. He is the author of “Hearing the Hurt”: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Ethics of the New Negro Movement (Alabama) and a number of research essays that have appeared, for instance, in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, New Media & Society, and Communication Studies. Prof. Watts has been honored for his research by the National Communication Association (RCT New Investigator Award in 2002, African American Communication and Culture Division in 2008 and 2002).

Kirt Wilson, Penn State University, is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communication. Wilson is a rhetorical critic and theorist whose research moves from African American public discourse to presidential rhetoric and from nineteenth-century rhetorical practice to theories of social change and race. Professor Wilson graduated from Purdue University with an MA in 1991 and from Northwestern University with a Ph.D. in 1995. Prior to coming to Penn State, Dr. Wilson served as Assistant and Associate Professors of rhetoric and communication at the University of Minnesota (1996-2010). There he taught courses in African American civil rights discourse, argument theory and practice, close textual criticism, collective memory, sentimental aesthetics, and US public address. He served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Communication Studies Department at Minnesota and as a faculty adviser on numerous collegiate and university committees. From 2008-2009 he was a CIC Academic Leadership Fellow. In addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place (Michigan State 2002) and an Associate Editor for The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (2009). In 2004, the University of Minnesota honored professor Wilson with a McKnight Presidential Fellowship, an honor extended to only a handful of tenured associate faculty each year. Professor Wilson has won the National Communication Association’s New Investigator Award (2001), the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award (2002), and two book awards – NCA’s Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award and the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for Published Research. Professor Wilson is currently writing two book-length manuscripts. In the first he considers the theory and practices of mimesis (imitation) in the nineteenth-century United States. In the second he is uncovering the sentimental aesthetics that construct our collective memories of the civil rights movement. In 2010 he published a book chapter titled, “The Racial Contexts of Public Address: Reconstruction Violence as Text and Context,” in the Handbook of Public Address and “Debating the Great Emancipator,” in the journal Rhetoric & Public Affairs.

Sue Zaeske, University of Wisconsin, is Professor of Communication Arts and Associate Dean for Advancement, Arts and Humanities. She served as chair of the Department of Communication Arts from 2008 – 2011. Recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship, Zaeske is instructor of the popular lecture course Great Speakers and Speeches. She also teaches a number of courses on American public discourse including African-American rhetoric, women’s discourse, presidential rhetoric, and social movement discourse. She has facilitated experiential education courses on African-American and LGBTQ civil rights history in which she had led students through travels to meet movement activists and visit historical sites. Zaeske joined the communication arts faculty in 1996. Her research centers on rhetoric, history, gender, race, and political culture. Her work is interdisciplinary, and she has published scholarly articles and book chapters in the fields of history, English, political science, and communication. Her work has garnered several major national awards, including the National Communication Association’s 2004 James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address for Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). In recognition of her significant scholarship and contributions to campus, Zaeske was named a Letters & Science Faculty Fellow (2008-2013), and is among the first faculty to receive this award. She previously received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2003) and was a Vilas Research Associate (2003-05). She holds a BA in communication arts and journalism with a certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies, and an MA, and PhD in communication arts, all from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining the University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, Zaeske was employed as a reporter and copy editor for the Milwaukee Journal, the Racine Journal-Times, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the Wisconsin State Journal.