McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation
McCourtney Institute for Democracy Senior Scholar
Professor of English and of Communication Arts and Sciences
208 Burrowes Building
University Park , PA 16802
Biography:
Debra Hawhee is McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation, Senior Scholar in the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, and Professor of English and Communication Arts and Sciences as well as Director of Graduate Studies in English at Penn State University. She studies and teaches histories and theories of rhetoric with a particular focus on rhetoric’s less-than-rational elements. She has written about bodily and material theories of rhetoric, ancient and modern. She is author of Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, which received the 2010 Diamond Anniversary Book Award from the National Communication Association, as well as Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece. Hawhee is co-author, with Sharon Crowley, of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, now in its fifth edition. Her latest book Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation, will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press. Her research has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Spencer Foundation, and Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities. She has published articles in Rhetorica,Philosophy and Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, College English, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, and College Composition and Communication.