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CFP for RhetCanada’s 2026 Conference Now Available

 

Image of half-woman, half-Aristotle face with phone and information about conference.

RhetCanada (The Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric) invites submissions for our 2026 conference from May 28th-30th at St. Jerome’s University (SJU), a college of the University of Waterloo. This conference will be a large and unique joint event, comprising the annual conferences of RhetCanada and the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing/Association canadienne de redactologie, and the Rhetoricon project.  

For more information and submission instructions, see the conference website. Deadline for submissions is January 19th, 2026.

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Ancient Greek Sophistry and Its Legacy

Ancient Greek Sophistry and Its Legacy is an international conference which will be held Thursday, Dec. 12 online. The conference will feature sixteen presentations by scholars from seven countries. The conference celebrates the publication of a special issue of Humanities, and is sponsored by RhetCanada. For more information and to register, see the conference webpage. 

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Sarah Casey Wins the 2024 Michael Purves-Smith Paper Award

Congratulations to Sarah Casey, who has won RhetCanada’s 2024 Michael Purves-Smith Paper Award for the best paper presented by a graduate student at the RhetCan annual conference, and to Rachel Roy, who received a runner-up prize for the award.

In her winning paper, “Risk as a Common Topos,” Sarah described how communication and scholarship often treat risk as an idion topos for discussing uncertainty and hazards. She argues that it has become a koinon topos in our social discourse, one where we find technical arguments for risk management… or where we find arguments for managing all kinds of other things.

In her runner-up paper, “Locating Recuperative Ethos: Students with Disabilities Navigate University Accommodations,” Rachel identified the rhetorical moves that students make as they access the university, and argued that students perform “recuperative ethos” and “agile epistemologies” (Molloy) as they reconstruct these rhetorical moves.

As always, the conference featured an array of impressive student papers, and the judges would like to express their appreciation to all the students who presented.

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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!

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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.