Scholars to Examine Ways Language Shapes Communities

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A panel of the country’s leading experts on writing and communication will lead a campus symposium on rhetoric, community and literacy from 2 to 4 p.m. Friday, Feb. 2, in room 507 of the Arkansas Union.

Andrea Lunsford, professor of English at Stanford University; Michael Leff, professor of communication at the University of Memphis; and Beth Daniell, professor of English at Kennesaw State University, will present brief papers and then lead a discussion of how the concepts of “the public,” “civic responsibility” and “the community” are shaped by the rhetorical and literate practices of governmental, educational and not-for-profit organizations.

The symposium is a prelude to the honors colloquium on rhetoric, community and literacy that will be team-taught in Fall 2007 by professors Thomas Rosteck and Thomas Frentz of the department of communication and professor David Jolliffe of the department of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Lunsford is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English and director of the program in writing and rhetoric at Stanford University. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Lunsford was distinguished professor of English and director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at Ohio State University. She is the author or editor of 14 books, most recently The St. Martin’s Handbook, 6^th edition, and, with Lahoucine Ouzgane, Exploring Borderlands: Composition and Postcolonial Studies.

Leff is professor and chair of the department of communication at the University of Memphis. Before coming to Memphis in 2003, he held appointments at the University of California-Davis, the University of Wisconsin and Northwestern University. He has published widely on the relation between rhetoric and dialectic, most recently examining the civic educational views of Isocrates.

Daniell directs the composition program at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. She has also taught at West Virginia University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Clemson University and the University of Alabama. She is the author of A Community of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery.