Join us in welcoming guest lecturer Debra Hawhee, McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation at Penn State University, who studies and teaches rhetoric, the art of communication, and writes histories of rhetorical theory that draw out rhetoric’s other-than-rational dimensions — feeling, bodies, sensation, imagination.
Hawhee will give a talk titled “What do we do with Feeling?” that considers the work that feeling is currently doing in rhetoric and in the critical humanities more broadly and ask what else might be done with this deliberately amorphous category. Examples from contemporary climate art and from congressional testimony of youth climate activists help Hawhee theorize how something like rhetorical mood works alongside—and helps to clarify—other conceptual approaches to feeling such as affect, sensation, the visceral.