Keynote Speakers and Featured Presenters

The conference will feature two distinguished Keynote Speakers:

Joseph R. Gusfield (University of California, San Diego) draws on Burke in his studies of social ritual and symbol, sociology of law, social movements, and the rhetoric of social science. Although Burkeans may be most familiar with his edited collection of Burke’s writings, On Symbols and Society, he is also the author of such well-regarded works as Mass Society and Extremist Politics, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement, The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order, and Performing Action: Artistry In Human Behavior And Social Research.

John S. Wright (University of Minnesota) is the Morse-Amoco Distinguished Teaching Professor of African American & African Studies and English, and is the Faculty Scholar for the Archie Givens Sr. Collection of African American Literature & Life. His 2006 book, Shadowing Ellison, provides an explicitly Burkean reading of Ralph Ellison’s work, an explication of Ellison’s interest in the interrelated topics of symbolicity, technology, and leadership within the context of American history and democracy. In addition to numerous journal articles, presentations, and chapters, his other books include A Ralph Ellison Festival (coedited with poet Michael Harper), and A Stronger Soul within a Finer Frame: Portraying African-Americans in the Black Renaissance.

The convention program will also contain three Featured Presenters:

Cheree Carlson (Hugh Downs School of Communication, Arizona State University) extends the critical use of Burkean theory as a tool for rhetorical criticism, and has published much work on the rhetoric surrounding gender roles as developed by agents of both sexes. She is the author of over twenty articles, including “You Know It When You See It: The Rhetorical Hierarchy of Race and Gender in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander,” “Limitations of the Comic Frame: Some Witty American Women of the Nineteenth Century,” and “Gandhi and the Comic Frame: Ad Bellum Purificandum.”

Michael Hyde (Wake Forest University) has publications in journals and anthologies that span across disciplines. The most recent of his five books is The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment. His The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia was awarded the National Communication Association’s Diamond Anniversary Book Award and the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for Outstanding Research in Public Address. As is the case with some of his past scholarship, his current book project, Coming to Terms with Perfection, draws from the work of Kenneth Burke.

Robert Perinbanayagam (Hunter College, City University of New York) draws extensively on Burke’s writings in his sociological research to theorize social linguistics, cultural norms, and identity construction. He is the author of numerous articles and several influential books, including Games and Sport in Everyday Life: Dialogues and Narratives of the Self, The Karmic Theater: Self, Society and Astrology in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, Signifying Acts and Discursive Acts, and The Presence of Self. He is the recipient of the G. H. Mead Award and the C. H. Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the Theory Award from the American Sociological Association (Theory Section) for The Presence of Self.