Full abstracts are available for each of the paper sessions at the 2026 Symposium in Portland, Oregon.
The following abstracts are for Panel 2: Rereading Rhetorical History and History of Rhetoric from 10:45-12:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 21.
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“Taste, Imagination, and the ‘Improvement of Thought’: Enlightenment Rhetoric and the Emergence of Cognitive Theory” — Lisa Arnold (North Dakota State University) and Mafruha Shifat (Ohio State University)
Abstract: Cognitive theory, most notably advanced by scholars like Flower and Hayes in the 1980s, is often regarded as a modern turn in the history of rhetoric. Their work sought to reveal how writing emerged out of, and therefore could be controlled by, the mind. These principles did not arise in a vacuum; they were built on a longer intellectual tradition rooted in colonial epistemologies. These early frameworks privileged disembodied cognition as the highest form of rhetorical value, establishing a hierarchy in which certain minds and bodies were granted dignity while others were systemically erased. These ideals were articulated in the Enlightenment rhetorical theories of Blair, Campbell, and Sheridan. These scholars promoted imperialist logics of mental and bodily self-regulation and composure. In this presentation, we conduct a decolonial analysis of Enlightenment rhetoric, which promoted concepts such as taste, imagination, and the “improvement of thought.” These concepts centered the mind as the primary site of intellect, knowledge production, and ultimately, good writing. In turn, these rhetoricians prioritized the mind over the body, rhetorically disciplining the body into a mere supplement for the mind and ignoring its value as an integral part of the production of knowledge. Our decolonial historical analysis reveals a problematic foundation for the later cognitivist movement in rhetoric and writing studies, upon which some contemporary rhetorical theory has relied. In conducting this analysis, we illustrate the value of decolonial theory for challenging key premises of the history of rhetoric that have since been forwarded across centuries, contexts, and cultures.
“The Baltic Question on the Airwaves: Rhetorics of U.S. International Broadcasting” — Kristen Einertson (University of St. Thomas)
Abstract: In March 2025, the U.S. government-funded international broadcaster Voice of America faced renewed presidential scrutiny when President Donald Trump called for defunding the agency, threatening to end its 83-year operation serving 510 million people in 49 languages. While alarming to many invested in U.S. foreign policy, the episode was not unprecedented. Even during the Cold War, when the “Radios” (Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) were credited with advancing U.S. influence abroad, the agencies experienced fluctuating funding and sustained disputes over language prioritization. Decisions about which languages merited broadcast support were shaped by competing political, strategic, and foreign policy arguments advanced by both state and non-state actors and often foreshadowed shifting U.S. foreign policy priorities. This paper examines how the Joint Baltic American National Committee (JBANC) successfully advocated for expanded broadcasts in Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian during the late Cold War and crafted appeals that navigated complex tensions within U.S. Cold War policy, including the paradox of affirming Baltic independence in principle while accommodating Soviet occupation in practice. Situated within broader foreign policy deliberations, these campaigns show how the Radios became a site where transnational publics negotiated tensions between freedom of information and political constraint. Reading these Cold War debates alongside present disputes highlights how struggles over international broadcasting persist across ideological commitments and geopolitical alignments, demonstrating how the past continues to shape contested visions of U.S. foreign policy and democratic communication abroad.
“Ghosts of Rhetorics Past: Recovering Malintzin as Rhetorician” — Miriam Fernandez (California State University, San Bernardino)
Abstract: In 1519, in present-day Mexico City, a meeting took place between a great Tlatoani named Moctezuma and a Spanish captain named Hernán Cortés. Two interpreters made the conversation possible: Jerónimo de Aguilar and an Indigenous teenage girl known as Malintzin. Although the particulars of that meeting are lost to us, we do know that each person in that tenuous chain of discourse was employing rhetoric at every turn. I use historical, cultural, and rhetorical analysis to carve out a space for Malintzin in the rhetorical tradition by showing the communicative successes and failures that she made possible. I analyze Moctezuma’s speech, recorded in writing by Hernan Cortés, and compare it to existing Tlatoani speeches that were written down in Book 6 of the Florentine Codex. Through my analysis, I identify sections of the speech that were likely translated accurately (although they were culturally misunderstood) from the parts of the speech that don’t make sense in Nahuatl discourse and were most likely invented by Cortés to serve his political needs. By analyzing early Nahuatl texts, I identify the rhetorical moves Malintzin needed to make to allow communication between two powerful men to happen. Through my analysis, I make the case that the indigenous interpreter Malintzin successfully used rhetoric to convey ideas present in the known discourse of Nahua rulers and identify how Cortés used cultural differences in language and communication to his advantage in telling the story of his meeting with Moctezuma.
“Rhetoric’s Invisible Core: Looking Toward Youth and Youthfulness in the History of Rhetoric” — Genevieve Gordon (Penn State University)
Abstract: Alongside other humanistic disciplines, rhetoric has experienced a turn toward youth and childhood as areas of critical inquiry in the past decade. Inspired by the ASHR symposium’s foci on rhetoric’s disciplinary legacy and new modes of inquiry, I posit another underexplored way of studying youth’s relationship to rhetoric is to consider the various roles youth and children have taken in rhetoric’s history. One productive method of doing so is to track youthfulness as a shifting, historically contingent constellation of rhetorical qualities and affordances attributed to the young across rhetorical theory. Doing so in concert with contemporary contexts leads to a host of productive, cross-temporal questions. How, for example, could conspiratorial claims that survivors of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida were “crisis actors” recall ancient and early modern pedagogical assumptions about the malleability and innate imitative skill of young learners? How might nineteenth-century, Romantic visions of rhetorical “authenticity” foreshadow the widespread emotional resonance of youth climate activist rhetors? Here, I model my approach by locating articulations of youthfulness in the works of the Western rhetorical tradition’s most youth-oriented theorists: Quintilian and Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Both pedagogues wrote with young students in mind, and while the students’ voices themselves are relegated to the background of texts like the Institutio Oratoria and De Copia, shifting to a focus on youthfulness allows us to see how topoi of shape, materiality, and bodily substance help constitute youthfulness as a set of rhetorical characteristics derived from real interactions and experiences with young rhetors.