Lecture Series

The Rhetorical Leadership program sponsors nationally-known scholars of rhetoric — the study and analysis of how symbols (e.g., speeches, visuals, letters, memos, social protest, opinion pieces, web postings) influence people and so exercise power — to lecture at UWM on various aspects of leading people through language and arguments rather than formal authority.

lecture-series

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Lecture Series by Scholars of Rhetoric

2020–2021 — Dr. Raka Shome, Villanova University. “Cleaning the Nation:  National Purification, Contemporary Hindu Nationalism, and the Politics of Gender.”
2019–2020 — Dr. Isaac West, Vanderbilt University. “Pauli Murray’s Rhetorical Leadership Through Intersectional Analogies.”
2018-2019 – Dr. Victoria J. Gallagher, North Carolina State University. “The Virtual Martin Luther King (vMLK) Project: Crafting a Necessary (Digital) Space to Explore Rhetorical Leadership and Civic Transformation.”
2017-2018 – Dr. Lisa Flores, University of Colorado Boulder. “The Promise of Race and the Whiteness of Nation.”
2016 – Dr. Mary E. Stuckey, Georgia State University. “Anger in Presidential Elections.”
2015 – Dr. Jeremy Engels, Pennsylvania State University. “The Rhetoric of Gratitude: From Debt to Freedom.”
2013-2014 – Dr. David Zarefsky, Northwestern University. “Abraham Lincoln’s Rhetorical Leadership.”
2012-2013 – Dr. Charles E. Morris III, Syracuse University. “Sunder the Children: Abraham Lincoln’s Queer Rhetorical Pedagogy.”
2011-2012 – Dr. Kirt H. Wilson, Pennsylvania State University. “Imitation, Leadership, and Violence: How to Understand Racial Hostilities After the Civil War.”
2010-2011 – Dr. Catherine Palczewski, University of Northern Iowa. “Taming Women’s Embodied Argument: The Transgressive Potential of Suffrage Advocates’ Body Argument and Social Responses of Recuperation.”
2009-2010 – Dr. John M. Murphy, University of Illinois. “Barack Obama, the Joshua Generation, and Political Leadership.”
2008-2009 – Dr. Martin J. Medhurst, Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “Presidential Speechwriting and the Nomination Acceptance Address, 1932-2004.”
2007-2008 – Dr. Shawn J. Parry-Giles, University of Maryland. “Mediating Hillary Rodham Clinton: The News Media as Arbiters of Political Authenticity.”
2006-2007 – Dr. Bonnie Dow, Vanderbilt University. “Rhetorical Leadership, Movements, and Media: The Difficult Case of 1970s Feminism in the U.S.”
2005 – Dr. James R. Andrews, Indiana University. “Rhetorical Leadership and the Struggle for an Ethical Culture.”
2004 – Dr. G. Thomas Goodnight, University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. “Rhetoric and Risk: Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes.”