News & Events

Dr. Melody Lehn, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies, has recently published an article in the Journal for the History of Rhetoric entitled “I Would Like to Take a Course in Public Speaking, Not That I Ever Intend to Make a Speech: Lady Bird Johnson, Collaborative Rhetorical Learning, and the Rhetorical First Lady Revisited.”

Faculty and students gathered in McGriff Alumni House on February 25, 2026 to hear a spirited debate that examined a topic important to our campus community: the University parking policy.

Anne Mitchell Welch (C'22 Rhetoric Minor and former Center for Speaking & Listening Tutor) talks about how her time as Rhetoric minor contributes to her success as a tax analyst for the Nashville office of Ernst & Young (ER) financial services firm and what led her to set up an annual gift to the Rhetoric department.

Forty-seven faculty, staff, students, and community members gathered for the Public Speaking Contest in the Torian Room on April 24, 2025. Five students from across the college delivered speeches developed in sections of RHET 101: Public Speaking taught by Profs. Jamie Capuzza, Melody Lehn, and Sean O’Rourke in Easter 2024 and Advent 2024. In each section, students voted on a class “champion” to represent them in the contest. 

Thursday, April 24, 2025
7:00pm
duPont Library - Torian Room

The annual Public Speaking Contest will be held on Thursday, April 24 at 7:00 p.m. in the Torian Room (duPont Library). Contestants deliver a 10-11 minute persuasive speech advocating change or alteration in existing attitudes, values, beliefs, and actions (policy changes, reconsideration of issues, public deliberation) on a highly controversial public issue. Awards will be given for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place. Top speakers are chosen by class vote and instructor vetting from each of the RHET 101 Public Speaking sections.

Light refreshments will follow.

Monday, April 21, 2025
7:00pm
Naylor Auditorium, Gailor Hall

Seven Rhetoric students recently presented competitively selected papers at the Undergraduate Honors Research Conference (UHRC) held at the 2025 meeting of the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Papers emerged from Dr. Sean O’Rourke’s RHET 411: Rhetoric in the Age of Protest I: 1948-1973 course, and undergraduate theses mentored by O’Rourke and Dr. Melody Lehn, who both accompanied the students.

Dr. Melody Lehn, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies, has contributed the chapter “First Ladies, Suffrage, and the Equal Rights Amendment” to the new Cambridge Companion to US First Ladies (Cambridge University Press, 2025). 

Professor Melody Lehn is featured in the latest Professor Spotlight of Sewanee's student newspaper, the Sewanee Purple. With the publication of her latest book One Hundred Years of Women Debating the Equal Rights Amendment: An Anthology 1923-2023, Lehn has garnered national attention for her focus on the contributions of women to public speaking, argumentation and the art of oratory.

Sewanee Professor Melody Lehn has published a new book entitled One Hundred Years of Women Debating the Equal Rights Amendment: An Anthology, 1923-2023. The culmination of a years-long project in conjunction with co-editor, Professor Camille Lewis of Furman University, this timely edited collection of primary texts comprehensively surveys women’s arguments about the ERA from its inception through the present day. 

Thursday, November 21, 2024
2:30pm
New Orleans, LA

Drs. O’Rourke and Capuzza will present a paper at the National Communication Association convention on the second impeachment of Donald Trump. Specifically, they explore the interrelated rhetorical dynamics at play in the trial: the multiple audiences to which the managers appealed (Republican Senators, the media, the American public, and the future), the lines of argument they advanced (incitement, violation, and abuse), and the manifold fields of judgment these dynamics open to critics.

October 30, 2024
10:00am-11:00am
Online - Register here

Dr. Jamie Capuzza will offer a virtual continuing education lecture through the Cleveland Law Library, the Cleveland Public Library, and the Stark County Law Library entitled, “Legal Challenges in Ohio’s Fight for Women’s Suffrage” on October 30, 2024. 

Join Dr. Melody Lehn as she explores how Roosevelt's support drew both praise and censure, as the school's integrated activities imagined a nation where people of all races could gather together and collaboratively address regional problems.

More than ninety students, faculty, staff, and community members participated in the DebateWatch between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on September 10, 2024.

August 9, 2024
Online Lecture
Many of us were taught the US women’s rights movement began with a convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. While this gathering was an important catalyst, this program will explain how it was a convention held in Salem, Ohio two years later that took the movement to a whole new level, from a local gathering to a statewide effort.

Five Sewanee faculty, students, and administrators traveled to Frisco, Texas to participate in the annual Southern States Communication Association Convention (SSCA). This year’s convention theme was “Communicating Belonging” and Sewanee attendees participated in various panels concerned with questions of rhetorical allyship, racial justice, and the place of rhetorical learning in diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. 

The 2023 Festival of Speaking & Listening showcased 8 student finalists across two speaking contest days with speeches ranging from 'reliable models for traumatic brain injuries' to 'school shootings: a big problem for small towns.'

Six Sewanee students and two professors attended the Civil Resistance, Nonviolent Activism & Human Rights workshop at the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights, which took place from March 20 to 24 at Magdalen College at the University of Oxford.

Monday, October 3
5:00pm CDT
Gailor Auditorium

Join us for a lecture by Profs. Angela Ray & Paul Stob on lecturing, learning, & difference in the long nineteenth century. 
*Book signing to follow.

Armed with a 70-year-old map and a dollar-store broom, CS&L Tutor Mitch Shakespeare uncovers a long-lost piece of Sewanee and Delta Tau Delta history on a sandstone bluff.

Sewanee student and Psychology major, Margaret Lorenzen is among the 2022 Appalachian College Association Scholars.  Each year, outstanding students are provided funding to help them to pursue research projects over the summer.  Ms. Lorenzen will work under faculty mentor, Dr. Sean O'Rourke on her Go Tell It On the Mountain Project: An Optimistic Research Study of the Rhetoric of Place and Controversy.  Lorenzen will present her work in the fall of 2022. 

With generous support from the Office of Undergraduate Research, the Rhetoric Program, and the Center for Speaking & Listening, three Sewanee students–Makenzie Pentz, Anne Mitchell Welch, and Annie West–presented papers at the recent Theodore Clevenger Undergraduate Honors Conference in Greenville, South Carolina...

Since the start of the pandemic, a period during which many people have felt much less ambitious than usual, O’Rourke has actually published three books! In addition to the introductions and section introductions, O’Rourke also has chapters in each of these books.

Professor Sean Patrick O’Rourke (Rhetoric and American Studies) published Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit-Ins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020), co-edited with Professor Lesli K. Pace of Southeast Missouri State. The book is a part of USC Press’s Rhetoric and Communication series.

RHET 331: Voices of American Women class welcomed Dr. Wanda Little Fenimore, Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at the University of South Carolina-Sumter, to remotely join the class on March 29, 2021.

See details for our statement condemning racism.

Join Read SC and the Georgia Center for the Book for another On My Mind event. Editors Sean Patrick O’Rourke and Lesli K. Pace will discuss their companion books Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit-Ins and the forthcoming On Fire: Five Civil Rights Sit-Ins and the Rhetoric of Protest. This virtual event is free and open to the public, but you must register on Eventbrite to receive the link to the Zoom webinar.

The Southern States Communication Association has awarded Dr. Sean Patrick O’Rourke the 2020 J. Donald Ragsdale Award for Mentoring. 

A Lecture by Belinda A. Stillion Southard, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, University of Georgia

Professors Sean O’Rourke (Rhetoric and American Studies) and Melody Lehn (Rhetoric and Women’s and Gender Studies) have published the book Rhetoric, Race, Religion, and the Charleston Shootings: Was Blind but Now I See with Lexington Books in its “Rhetoric, Race, and Religion” Series.

Author and professor David Frank will speak on the Long Civil Rights Movement.

The Clevenger conference, one of the oldest and most prestigious undergraduate research forums in the field of rhetoric, attracts students from as far away as the University of Puget Sound and Florida Atlantic University and nearly everywhere in between.

Fifteen finalists participated in four public speaking contests in the 2019 Festival of Speaking & Listening, held on April 23, 24, and 25.

Assistant Professor Melody Lehn was recognized on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 with the university’s citation for Excellence in Teaching.

University of Texas-Austin Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller to speak on "The Pleasures of Outrage: Why We Love Demagoguery"

Over the first weekend of Spring Break, three representatives of Sewanee’s Center for Speaking & Listening took a leading role in the 2018 Lansing Lee Conference on “Civil Discourse in America,” held at the Kanuga Conference Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina.