CGeraths ASHR, like many others in the Rhetorical Studies community, is mourning the recent death of James J. Murphy. On behalf of the organization, Richard Leo Enos, ASHR Past President, has composed a touching remembrance of Murphy and his contributions to our organization. It is attached here.
Please join all of us in remembering the life of James J. Murphy. He will be missed.
The three 2021 Award Selection Committees of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric delight in sharing the outcome of their deliberations and in inviting you to attend the ASHR Business Meeting on Saturday, November 20, from 11-12:15, in Issaquah AB (third floor), to celebrate the winners.
Outstanding Mentor Award
Prof. Andre E. Johnson, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Memphis, has been chosen as the inaugural recipient of the ASHR Outstanding Mentor Award. The selection committee praised Prof. Johnson’s record of engaged and proactive mentoring, noting how he extends his mentorship to students and colleagues even before they recognize their own need and staying with them for the long haul. The committee noted the broad and positive effects that Prof. Johnson’s mentoring has had on the study of rhetorical history, even at this relatively early stage in his career. Prof. Johnson’s mentorship has already and will continue to promote research on histories of rhetoric that have been previously neglected. Prof. Johnson himself is a catalyzing figure, attracting diverse voices to ASHR and to rhetorical studies more broadly. Agreeing with nominators who wrote, “Truly, his students, colleagues, and community are better because of his dedication and talents,” the selection committee is pleased to honor Prof. Johnson and recognize the community that he creates and sustains through his mentoring.
Outstanding Dissertation Award
Dr. Florianne “Bo” Jimenez, author of ““Echoing and Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonization,” has been selected as the recipient of the 2021 American Society for the History of Rhetoric Outstanding Dissertation Award, which honors a dissertation of especial significance to the Society’s mission defended in the past year. The selection committee was particularly impressed with Dr. Jimenez’s treatment of an era of US colonialism rarely discussed in the discipline of Rhetoric, as well as the nuanced integration of texts, critical theory, and methodological choices. (Several committee members noted that they found themselves so engaged that they wanted to read the entire dissertation.) The dissertation was completed under the directorship of Dr. Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Jimenez is now Assistant Professor of English and Co-Director of the Writing Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Honorable Mention went to Dr. Misti Yang for “Code Me a Good Reason: Joseph Weizenbaum and the Rhetoric of AI.” Dr. Yang is currently a Mellon Assistant Professor of the Public Communication of Science and Technology at Vanderbilt, having defended in August 2021 under the directorship of Dr. Damien Smith Pfister, in the department of Communication at the University of Maryland.
Outstanding Student Paper Award
Jennifer Woolley, a PhD student at Ohio University, is being recognized for “Complicating Culpability: Planned Parenthood’s Historical Apologia on Margaret Sanger.” The selection committee was particularly impressed with how her analysis of apologia in Planned Parenthood’s centennial discourse can help rhetoricians understand the obligations involved in addressing our own institutions’ problematic pasts. If you are attending NCA, you will be able to hear this paper on Thursday, November 18, on the 2-3:15pm panel in Issaquah AB (third floor).
Honorable Mention went to Caroline Koons, PhD candidate in Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University, for “Parrhesiac Voice: Freedom Riders, Singing Dissent, and Parchman Prison”
ASHR Steering Committee member Dr. Christa Olson chaired the Outstanding Mentor and Outstanding Student Paper selection committees. Thanks to Dr. Derek Handley, Dr. Melba Vélez Ortiz, and Dr. Mary Stuckey for serving on the former, and Dr. Ira Allen, Dr. Ben Crosby, and Dr. Miriam Fernández for serving on the latter. ASHR Steering Committee member Dr. Jamie Downing chaired the Outstanding Dissertation committee. Thanks to Dr. Nicole Allen, Dr. René De los Santos, and Dr. Elizabeth Miller for serving on that committee.
Congratulations to the winners and to those nominated. Gratitude to everyone who wrote nomination materials.
The form for nominations is here.
Directly after NCA’s ASHR Business Meeting this month, the two-year terms of nearly all ASHR Steering Committee members expire, including most officers. It’s been two years we won’t soon forget.
For reasons of accessibility, we are conducting ASHR Steering Committee nomination and election processes exclusively through digital means.
Feel free to email it to people you think ought to consider running, even if you aren’t certain of their membership status. We’d appreciate it if you’d not post the link to the form on your socials, though. (Our social media plan is to refer rather than to link.)
Any forms submitted after Friday, November 12, at 5pm Pacific, WILL NOT go on the ballot.
The ballot will be sent to you all no later than Tuesday, November 16, with voting to cease on Sunday, November 21, at 5pm Pacific.
The deadline for the inaugural Outstanding Mentor Award has been extended until Friday, October 22! Please submit nominations, as noted below.
American Society for the History of Rhetoric
Outstanding Mentor Award
Call for Nominations
The American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) invites submissions for its inaugural Outstanding Mentor Award. We are excited to introduce this award and to recognize the formative, consequential mentoring that sustains the history of rhetoric and those who study it.
Eligibility: Nominees for the Award must be: a) either current members of ASHR or willing to join upon receipt of the award and b) have a past relationship with or be willing to commit to a future relationship to ASHR.
Nomination packets must include:
The selection committee will base its decision on the following criteria:
Please submit all materials via email (MS Word or PDF) to the selection committee co-chair, Prof. Christa Olson, at christa.olson@wisc.edu (.)
The deadline for submissions is October 22, 2021.
For more on ASHR awards, including a list of past winners, click here.
Dr. Christa Olson
Professor
Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison
American Society for the History of Rhetoric
Outstanding Mentor Award
Call for Nominations
The American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) invites submissions for its inaugural Outstanding Mentor Award. We are excited to introduce this award and to recognize the formative, consequential mentoring that sustains the history of rhetoric and those who study it.
Eligibility: Nominees for the Award must be: a) either current members of ASHR or willing to join upon receipt of the award and b) have a past relationship with or be willing to commit to a future relationship to ASHR.
Nomination packets must include:
The selection committee will base its decision on the following criteria:
Please submit all materials via email (MS Word or PDF) to the selection committee co-chair, Prof. Christa Olson, at christa.olson@wisc.edu (.)
The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2021.
For more on ASHR awards, including a list of past winners, click here.
Dr. Christa Olson
Professor
Department of English
University of Wisconsin-Madison
American Society for the History of Rhetoric
Outstanding Dissertation Award
Call for Nominations
The American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) invites submissions for its 2021 Outstanding Dissertation Award.
The ASHR Outstanding Dissertation Award honors a dissertation of especial significance to the Society’s mission and defended between September 11, 2020, and September 10, 2021. ASHR encourages a rich and pluralistic conception of the history of rhetoric. The selection committee hopes to see dissertations treating histories of rhetoric around the world, from any time period, and drawn from varied archives—formal and informal. We welcome historical work on rhetoric informed by a diversity of theoretical and methodological traditions.
Eligibility:
Non-members may be nominated or self-nominated for the award. ASHR will sponsor membership at the student rate for one year for the winner.
A dissertation may only be nominated for the Award once even if its date of defense would qualify it in two years.
Each nomination packet for the Award must include:
The selection committee will use the following criteria to determine the recipient of the Award:
Please submit all materials via email (MS Word or PDF) to the selection committee co-chair, Dr. Jamie Downing, at jamie.downing@gcsu.edu (.)
The deadline for submissions is October 1, 2021.
For more on ASHR awards, including a list of past winners, click here.
Dr. Jamie Downing
Assistant Professor of Rhetoric
Department of Communication
Georgia College
Rhetoric in Motu
Many definitions of rhetoric center around the ability to move, inspire, motivate, or energize. From the ability to call masses to action, to the catalyzing of social movements that interrogate and redefine the status quo, rhetoric is about mobility, motion, movement, potentiality, and energy.
Rhetoric in motu, a counterpart to our past symposium theme of rhetoric in situ, is the theme of the 2022 American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) Symposium, the first after a global pandemic that had forced many to stop and stay mostly in one place, location, nation, while challenging notions of presence and movement through technological and digital innovations. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified and made visible inequalities, differences as systemic, historic, stubborn in their stasis, yet moving many to new or renewed action. Rhetoric in motu is about mobility, motion, movement, energy, corporeality, connecting back to the 2020 symposium theme of excess, superfluidity, infinity, extravagance, and immoderation.
We are excited to announce three keynote speakers who will address the theme of the 2022 ASHR Symposium, rhetoric in motu: Maryam Ahmadi, Dr. Rudo Mudiwa, and Dr. Karrieann Soto Vega.
For more information on the 2022 ASHR Symposium, including the full CFP, click here.