International Rhetoric Workshop

The International Rhetoric Workshop offers participants the unmatched experience of international collaboration and learning within rhetorical studies. As a workshop leader, I was deeply impressed with the work students brought to our meetings and their eagerness and willingness to rethink their projects given the feedback of their peers. Most importantly, though, working with scholars from around the world allows participants to gain new perspective on their scholarship and to learn how rhetorical studies takes shape in contexts beyond their own. I learned so much. There is no doubt I will encourage junior scholars to participate in this event in 2020!

I can’t recommend the International Rhetoric Workshop highly enough. It provides a unique opportunity for global interaction at an intimate level. The workshop offers an experience of intellectual community where you can focus closely together on developing a project towards publication, where you can get to know other scholars, and where you can engage across interdisciplinary lines. 

The IRW was certainly one of the very best organized and creatively arranged workshop experiences I have been a part of. The variety of scholars from multiple nations and multiple disciplines taught me, as a faculty member, equally as much as anything I may have contributed to the very talented graduate students, and the opportunities for informal conversation made each day both career-enhancing and fun.

IRW is a well planned and organized workshop. Spending time and exchanging ideas with these bright young scholars from different continents is an inspiring and uplifting experience.

The International Rhetoric Workshop 2018 brought together an impressive 50-odd PhD students in Rhetoric from c. 10 different countries all over the world. It was my privilege to participate as faculty and leader of one of the “pods” of PhD students. These all presented scholarly work of a high caliber, which was then submitted to intense feedback and discussion. The whole structure and setup of the workshop, with keynote presentations, panels, and discussions in the “pods,” interlaced with warm and friendly social and cultural events, was extremely well prepared and turned out to be wonderfully useful and rewarding for all, PhD students and faculty alike. Also, networks and personal connections were formed and strengthened during the workshop, significantly expanding the intellectual horizon of all involved. I warmly recommend a continuation of this series of workshops as now been established, and I see the Ghent 2018 event as a perfect model. Future workshops along the same lines will greatly benefit the international community of scholars in rhetoric – a discipline dedicated to the study and preservation of democratic processes.