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RSA 2016 - Announcing Louise W. Knight as Keynote Speaker
Announcing Louise W. Knight as Keynote Speaker at RSA 2016 Conference in Atlanta
The RSA 2016 conference directors are pleased to announce that Louise W. (Lucy) Knight will deliver the keynote address at the 17th biennial meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America in Atlanta, Georgia, May 26-29, 2016.
Knight is a biographer and historian whose work has focused on the lives and rhetoric of leaders of social change. Her first book, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago, 2005), won the Illinois State Historical Society Russell Strange Memorial Book Award. That was followed by Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (W.W. Norton, 2010), the first full biography of Addams in almost forty years. Her current book project, titled American Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké and the First Fight for Human Rights, will be published by Flatiron Books, a new imprint of Macmillan, in 2018.
A member of the Rhetoric Society of America and the Organization of American Historians and a former NEH fellow, Knight is equally comfortable communicating with academic audiences and the general public. She has published articles on Jane Addams in the Journal of Women’s History, Gender and History, and other scholarly outlets. Her public writings have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Nation.com, and Huffington Post, and she has appeared on The Diane Rehm Show and C-SPAN’s Book TV. Knight lectures widely on issues of gender, rhetoric, activism, and social change to groups such as the Chautauqua Institution, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Harvard University.
Knight is an ideal choice to help us interpret the conference theme of “Rhetoric and Change.” We are grateful that she has agreed to join us in Atlanta! And we look forward to seeing you there, too!
- Conference directors Greg Clark (Brigham Young University), Cara Finnegan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), and Jenny Rice (University of Kentucky)
photo credit: Joan McClure
