Hi all,
Please consider applying to take part in one of the five workshops that make up the 2026 Thomas R. Watson Conference in Rhetoric and Composition. While more details are listed on the conference’s website, here are a couple of quick FAQ details:
Here is a link to the application.
I suspect you all might take particular interest in the workshops on Engaging the Senses in Rhetorical Histories, featuring Vessela Valiavitcharska, Alex Mueller, and Megan Poole, and Pan-Historiography Revisited: the Act and Art of Writing Capacious Histories, featuring Debbie Hawhee and Christa Olson. There will also be crossover sessions between these two exciting seminars.
Here are the full descriptions:
Engaging the Senses
Engaging in conversation. “Being there” with your subjects of study. Conveying a rich sensory experience through writing. This workshop examines how a focus on the senses achieves the kind of historical scholarship often associated with field or community-engaged research. Participants interested in rhetorical history and/or sensory rhetoric will consider: How have the senses shaped notions of style? How have style and aesthetic regimes shaped the senses? Why do theories of vision feature so prominently in histories of rhetoric? How does the dust and ephemera of archives bring history into presence?
Working together in structured, small-group collaborations, participants will apply each session’s theories, methods, or frameworks to their current works-in-progress. Session themes include 1) Education of the Senses; 2) Rhythm & Sound; 3) Proximity & Sight; 4) Agency & Touch.
Readings and topics may feature, but are not limited to, the colors of rhetoric, the art of listening, ancient theories of vision, arts of poetry, eastern medieval public ritual, and the materiality of archival records. At the close of the symposium, participants will be invited to share back their project ideas to a larger audience of rhetoric scholars that includes workshop participants from the “Pan-Historiography” workshop.
Pan-Historiography Revisited
This workshop takes as its starting point the book chapter, “Panhistoriography: The Challenges of Writing History across Time and Space” (published in Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, ed. M. Bailiff) in which the authors theorize the usefulness of writing sprawling, capacious histories. In the dozen plus years since that chapter appeared, rhetoric scholars have enacted, elaborated, and extended panhistoriography.
Many of these histories grapple with contemporary crises, demonstrating the usefulness of histories that span right to the present moment and beyond. Indeed, Alex Mueller, at the outset of his own capacious history, calls for the production of histories that refuse “to accept the past as so far gone and to accept the future as inevitable.” In that spirit, this workshop will investigate not only what has become possible via panhistoriographic methods to date but also what new pathways might be created now. In doing so, this workshop continues discussions begun at the U of L’s spring (2026) symposium on Pan-history. Participants will burrow into recent panhistories of rhetoric and then consider further possibilities for panhistoriographic encounters with archives, for writing decolonized histories, and for cultivating histories across not only time and space but also medium and mode.
Workshop sessions will include:
The final session (modal panhistoriography) will include an opportunity to gather and swap ideas with colleagues in the “Engaging the Senses in Rhetorical History” workshop.
Participants will, we hope, leave with generative, flexible tools for writing expansive histories.
If you have any questions, let us know at watson@louisville.edu.