Two of the English Department’s Rhetoric and Writing Professors, Stephen Benz and Michelle Kells, along with graduate student, Mariya Tseptsura attended the largest Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference yet in May of 2016. The RSA’s purpose is to support and advance the work of people who study rhetoric in a variety of disciplinary contexts, represents a large and growing community of scholars, teachers and students interested in the study of rhetoric and welcomes scholars, teachers, and students of rhetoric in all of its manifestations. RSA embraces a broad conception of rhetoric which includes spoken, written, visual and material texts circulating in a wide variety of situations ranging from the public to the private and from face-to-face to digital, within historical and contemporary social, political, and cultural contexts including race, gender, class, sexuality, and ethnicity among others. To find out more about the RSA, go here.
Michelle Kells presented , “An ‘Open Space for Democracy’: Environmental Rhetoric in the Southwest”;
Mariya Tseptsura presented, “Intercultural Rhetoric in a Composition Classroom: Changing Our Definition of Rhetoric”; and
Stephen Benz presented, “The Rhetoric of Regime Change: A Nineteenth-Century Antecedent”.
