sapientia et eloquentia

 wisdom and eloquence
April 20, 2026, 4:30 p.m, Torian Room (duPont Library)

Jeff Kurtz

About

Beginning in Easter 2025, the Festival of Speaking & Listening featured a Keynote Address by a teacher-scholar who committed to undergraduate research in rhetoric. Keynote Addresses are open to the university community and the general public.

2026 Keynote Speaker

The 2026 Festival Keynote Speaker will be Dr. Jeff Kurtz,  Professor of Rhetoric at Denison University. His keynote is titled "Bleeding Beneath the Escalator: Rebelling Against Rhetoric's In Extremis Prospects."

With the ten-year anniversary of the massacre of the Charleston Nine behind us, I reflect on the horrible tragedy's rhetorical aftermath —where impassioned debate spurred removal of the Confederate Flag from South Carolina’s state capital, a majestic eulogy imagined reconciliation, and a “sermon of return” ensured hallowed ground reclaimed the sacred from profane violence—and speculate on this: Did a presidential candidate’s descent down a gold-plated escalator mere days before the killing spree at Mother Emanuel perpetuate its own attempted murder? Now ten years on, we must ask: Is our public discourse on life support? Is rhetoric destined to remain a desiccated shell of itself? Reasons to hope are not easy to see, and we must try to name them.

Prof. Kurtz holds a B.A. from Mount Union College and a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Kurtz's teaching and research interests circle around issues of textual interpretation and rhetorics of reform and advocacy, particularly from the antebellum era, the African-American civil rights movement, and the intersection of religious and civic discourse in American public life. His articles and review essays have appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, The Review of Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs and the Journal of Communication and Religion.

Past Keynote Speakers
  • 2025 Keynote Speaker: Dr. Wanda Little Fenimore, Associate Professor of Speech Communication, University of South Carolina-Sumter, "Respectability and Resistance: Mrs. Ruby Cornwell's Activism in Jim Crow South Carolina."