Festival Keynote Address

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.

The 2026 Festival Keynote Speaker will be Dr. Jeff Kurtz,  Professor of Rhetoric at Denison University. 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."