Finland

Kari Palonen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Jyväskylä and editor-in-chief of the journal Redescriptions (Manchester University Press). His research examines the politics of dissensus and the rhetorical history of the concept of parliamentarism. He has published widely in English, German, and Finnish.

His publications include the books Quentin Skinner: History, Politics, Rhetoric (2003), “Objektivität” als faires Spiel: Wissenschaft als Politik bei Max Weber (2010), The Struggle with Time: A Conceptual History of ’Politics’ as an Activity (2nd edition, 2014), Politics and Conceptual Histories: Rhetorical and Temporal Perspectives (2014), The Politics of Parliamentary Procedure (2014) and From Oratory to Debate: The Parliamentarisation of Deliberative Rhetoric at Westminster (2016).

United States

Dilip Gaonkar is Professor in Rhetoric and Public Culture and the Director of Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University. He is also the Director of Center for Transcultural Studies, an independent scholarly research network concerned with global issues. He was closely associated with the journal Public Culture, serving as the Executive Editor (2000-2009) and as Editor (2009-2011). Gaonkar has two sets of scholarly interests: rhetoric as an intellectual tradition, both its ancient roots and its contemporary mutations; and, global modernities and their impact on the political.

He has published numerous essays on rhetoric, including “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science” that was published along with ten critical responses to the essay in a book, Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, edited by Alan G. Gross and William Keith (1996). Gaonkar has edited a series books on global cultural politics: Globaizing American Studies (with Brian Edwards, 2010), Alternative Modernities (2001), and Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (1995). He has also edited several special issues of journals: Laclau’s On Populist Reason (with Robert Hariman, for Cultural Studies, 2012), Cultures of Democracy (for Public Culture, 2007), Commitments in a Post-Foundational World (with Keith Topper, 2005), Technologies of Public Persuasion (with Elizabeth Povinelli, 2003), and New Imaginaries (with Benjamin Lee, 2002). He is currently working on a book manuscript on Modernity, Democracy and the Politics of Disorder.

United States

Debra Hawhee is McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation and Professor of English and Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University, where she also directs the Center for Democratic Deliberation. She studies and teaches histories and theories of rhetoric with a particular focus on rhetoric’s less-than-rational elements. She has written about bodily and material theories of rhetoric, ancient and modern. She is author of Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, which received the 2010 Diamond Anniversary Book Award from the National Communication Association, as well as Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece. She is co-author, with Sharon Crowley, of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, now in its fifth edition.

She has published articles in Rhetorica, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and College Composition and Communication. Her third book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation, completed with the aid of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2014-2015), will be published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press.