Kyle Gerber Wins 2023 Michael Purves-Smith Paper Award

Kyle Gerber has received RhetCanada’s Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award for his paper, “Re-imagining the Rhetorical Powers of Prayer,” presented at the 2023 RhetCanada conference. The committee offered the following comments:

Kyle’s study of prayer as devotional practice and theological site (with reference to Amish programs of spiritual formation and attitude) was interesting and demonstrated a sustained engagement with the thinking of Kenneth Burke. His paper provided a sustained, textured rhetorical treatment, and  his delivery was engaged, confident, and  invested in his topic. The work had a depth and maturity and commitment.

Congratulations Kyle!

Member News, March 2023

This is the first in a series of semi-annual posts sharing news about the activities of RhetCanada members, with the goal of helping us keep in touch with one another’s work. This post is a catch-up post, covering news from over the course of the pandemic. People have been busy!

We’ll be sending out an email requesting news items from current members about a month ahead of the next member news post in October.

We hope to see you (either in-person or virtually) at our annual conference May 30-June 1 at York University in Toronto. The program will be available in April.

New Positions/Promotions

Jonathan Doering started a two-year contract as Assistant Professor of English (Department of Literature, Folklore, and The Arts) at Cape Breton University.

Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher became the Canada Research Chair in Science, Health, and Technology Communication.

Sigrid Streit was recently tenured and promoted to Associate Professor of English at the University of Detroit Mercy.

Graduations

Monique Kampherm earned her Ph.D. in English-Rhetoric from the University of Waterloo in December 2022. Her dissertation, Masks and Caricatures: Prosopopoeia, Ethopoeia, and the Effect of Social Media on Canadian Political Leaders’ Debates (2023),  reveals how political leaders’ debates that were once a pivotal pillar to democracy are being (re)shaped in real time through social media, which is distorting information for voters, affecting the consciousness of political leaders, and disrupting the platform on which our democracy is built. Monique publishes on the effect of rhetoric and social media on Canadian political elections.

[Note: Arguments from Monique’s dissertation have been developed in the RhetCanada incubator over the years, including her prize-winning essay, “Democratic Prosopopoeia: The Rhetorical Influence Of The I-Will-Vote Image Filter On Social Media Profile Pictures During The 2015 Canadian Federal Election,” published in Rhetor 8.]

Awards and Honours

Randy Harris was elected Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada in 2022.

Shannon Lodoen received a  SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship in 2022.

Sigrid Streit received the University of Detroit Mercy 2021/2022 Faculty Achievement Award.

New Publications

Jonathan Doering

The Rhetorical Apprenticeship of Roland Barthes.” Barthes Studies, vol. 7, 2021, pp. 110-39.

The Linguistic Terror in France according to Jean Paulhan and Jean-Paul Sartre.Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 83, no. 4, Oct. 2022, pp. 555-578.

Randy Harris

Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Randy Allen Harris, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion, Routledge, 2022.

“The Tropes: Metaphor and its Friends.” The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion, edited by Jeanne Fahnestock and Randy Allen Harris, Routledge, 2022, pp. 227-45.

“Rules Are Rules: Rhetorical Figures as Algorithms.” Logic and Algorithms in Computational Linguistics, edited by Roussanka Loukanova, Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine, and Reinhard Muskens, Springer, 2023, pp. 217-259.

“Jagmeet’s Kairotic Challenge: Darkface, Turbans, and Hypocrisy Upwards.” Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture vol. 1, no. 2, 2022, pp. 171–204. [NOTE: Randy presented a version of this analysis at RhetCanada 2021]

Grammatical Constructions and Rhetorical Figures: The Case of Chiasmus.” LACUS Forum vol. 46, no. 1, 2022, pp. 35-61.

“Chiastic Iconicity: Refiguring Symmetry.” Iconicity in Cognition and across Semiotic Systems, edited by Sara Lenninger, Olga Fischer, Christina Ljungberg, and Elzbieta Tabakowska, John Benjamins), 2022, pp. 103-134.

Kara-Yakoubian, Mane, Alexander C. Walker, Konstantyn Sharpinskyi, Garni Assadourian, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, and Randy Allen Harris. 2022. “Beauty and Truth, Truth and Beauty: Chiastic Structure Increases the Subjective Accuracy of Statements.” Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale vol. 76, no. 2, 2022, pp. 144–155. [NOTE: Mane presented these experimental results at RhetCanada 2021]

Shannon Lodoen

Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and the Limits of Optimism: A Pessimistic Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 64, no. 1, 2023, pp. 85-97.

“Progress and Power in the First, Second, and Third Universities: A Case Study of the University of Waterloo”.” Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics vol. 2, no. 1, winter 2021.

Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher

On Expertise: Cultivating Character, Goodwill, and Practical Wisdom, Penn State UP, 2022.

Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio
Jeremy Packer, Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio, Alexander Monea, Kathleen Oswald, Kate Maddalena, and Joshua Reeves. The Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital. U of Minnesota P, 2023.
Tania Smith
Sigrid Streit

Mapping the Conversation: A Graphic Organizer Tool for Synthesis Assignments.” Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments, vol. 6, no. 22, 2022.

Newman, Sara, and Sigrid Streit. Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia Revisited: Sympathy, Science, and the Representation of Movement. Southern Illinois UP, 2020.

Pierre Zoberman
Translator, Blaise Pascal, Pensées. Catholic University of America Press, 2023.

Projects

Shannon Lodoen participated in conferences in Rome, Edmonton, and cyberspace on topics ranging from critical theory to poetry-reading. Since then, Shannon has been lucky enough to receive two independent teaching roles in composition and engineering communications courses, and is looking forward to teaching a course on her dissertation research entitled “The Rhetoric of Smartphones” in Fall 2023.

Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher is the inaugural Co-Director, with Nobel Prize recipient Donna Strickland, for the Trust in Research Undertaken in Science and Technology (TRuST).

Sigrid Streit was awarded a research leave for the upcoming academic year and is working on her monograph project, exploring kneeling as a rhetorical gesture, of which she will be discussing her early research at this year’s RhetCanada conference. Sigrid is also excited about her current engagement with Detroit Mercy’s Institute of Leadership and Service, where she is working with Fr. Tim Hipskind on developing Detroit Mercy’s service learning courses into community engaged learning initiatives.

Other News

Shannon Lodoen got married in summer 2022. Congratulations!

Pierre Zoberman retired in October 2021. [But, fortunately for us, he is still an active scholar!]

RhetCanada 2023 Conference CFP

RhetCanada will be holding its 2023 annual conference from May 30-June 1 at York University in Toronto, in association with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Our conference theme this year is Rhetoric, Reckonings, and Re-imaginings, and we welcome paper proposals in both English and French on a broad range of rhetoric-related topics. See our Call for Proposals for more information on the conference and how to submit a proposal. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 20. If you have any questions related to the conference, contact RhetCanada president Bruce Dadey.

RhetCanada Student Paper Award Winners 2022

We’re pleased to announce the RhetCanada student paper award winners for 2022.  The quality of the graduate and undergraduate presentations this year was outstanding, so congratulations to the winners and thanks to all those who presented!

Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award

The winner of the Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award for an outstanding paper by a graduate student was Máire Slater, for her paper “The Rhetoric of Reconciliation in the Music of Ubu and the Truth Commission”:

It is with great pleasure that the Student Prize Committee congratulates Máire Slater of the University of Waterloo on winning this year’s Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award, for her paper and presentation entitled “The Rhetoric of Reconciliation in the Music of Ubu and the Truth Commission.” The committee was unanimous in its decision, agreeing that Máire’s paper was not only of excellent quality in its written and presented forms, but also applied a very high standard of rhetorical scholarship to the analysis of a significant artefact. The clarity of the integration of musical theory in a manner accessible to non-specialists, and the attentiveness to the rhetorical dimensions of composition and performance were outstanding.

This award is given in honour of the late Michael Purves-Smith, and the Committee also wishes to acknowledge how Michael, with his deep commitment to the rhetorical possibilities of music, would have appreciated Máire’s paper and presentation. Máire’s engaged and nuanced  investigation of music as a site of and vehicle for rhetorical action would reassure Michael that RhetCanada continues to attract a breadth of scholarship of the highest calibre.

RhetCanada Undergraduate Paper Award

The winners of the RhetCanada Undergraduate Paper Award are Queenie Chen and Romina Hashemi for their paper “‘im gonna destroy the world before it destroys me’: Rhetoric and Construction Grammar”:

The RhetCanada Student Prize Committee is very pleased to announce that Queenie Chen and Romina Hashemi of the University of Waterloo are the 2022 winners of the RhetCanada Student Paper Award, for their paper “‘im gonna destroy the world before it destroys me’: Rhetoric and Construction Grammar.”

This well-prepared and engagingly presented paper offered a thought-provoking introduction to the role of grammatical structure in the construction and deployment of rhetorical figures. Queenie and Romina were attentive to the needs of an audience whose approach to rhetorical theory and criticism is diverse; they grounded their discussion of construction grammar as an approach and of the rhetorical figures such as chiasmus, antimetalepsis, and mesodiplosis in accessible terms which pointed the audience to exciting new directions for rhetorical inquiry.

We congratulate Queenie and Romina on their fine work and hope they will continue to share their important scholarship with RhetCanada in the future.

RhetCanada 2022 CFP Available

The 2022 RhetCanada annual conference will take place online from June 1-3, 2022. The theme for this year’s conference is Rhetoric: (Re)Conciliation, Resilience, Recovery.

We welcome paper proposals related to our conference theme and on a broad range of topics related to the theory, history, and practice of rhetoric. See our Call for Proposals for details about the conference and how to submit a proposal.  The deadline for proposals is January 10, 2022.

Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award Winners 2021

Congratulations to the two co-winners of RhetCanada’s Michael Purves-Smith Student Paper Award for 2021:

  • Maab Alkurdi, for her paper “Bitterly Rhetorical: Terror in the Autobiography of Zainab Salbi”
  • Shannon Lodoen, for her paper “Where is ‘Here’ and Who is ‘We’? Rhetorically Constructing a Unified Canada”

Congratulations as well to Maša Torbica, who won the Honourable Mention prize for her paper “Connective Activism: #Ottawapiskat and the Third Space of Sovereignty”

There were a number of outstanding papers this year, so the committee’s work was especially challenging. Thanks to all who presented!

Rhetor 8.1 is Now Available

We’re happy to announce that a special issue of our journal, Rhetor 8.1, is now available. The issue, guest edited by David Beard, focuses on the role of national identity in rhetoric scholarship and features articles from a wide variety of Canadian and international rhetoricians.

Previous issues of Rhetor can be accessed from our Rhetor Volumes page.