Cfp: "Rhetorics of Reason and Restraint: Stoic Speech from Antiquity to the Present," ASHR, Minneapolis, May 27-28, 2010.

Update: The programme has been posted here: http://www.communication.illinois.edu/nogorman/ashrsched.htm. Original Post (October 26, 2009): Annual conference of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric. Set within rhetoric's histories have been consistent cautionary voices, warning rhetors and their audiences of the dangers of rhetorical excesses, enthusiasms, and irrationalities. Stoicism has represented in its ethical ideal, if not always explicitly in its theories, such a cautionary voice—and a major one, influencing directly or indirectly Cicero and Augustine, Lipsius and Hobbes, Wollstonecraft and Lincoln, as well as contemporary ethics of criticism and ideals of public discourse. Plenary speakers at the ASHR Symposium will be Janet Atwill of the University of Tennessee, James Darsey of Georgia State University, and Lawrence Green of the University of Southern California. ASHR invites proposal covering historical as well as more contemporary subjects. Although papers on all aspects of rhetoric's history are invited, we especially welcome submissions that speak to issues related to the theme of Stoicism (e.g. reason, restraint, cosmopolitanism, philosophy's relationship to rhetoric). One-page single-spaced abstracts are due in electronic form (as .doc or .rtf files) to Ned O'Gorman at mailto:nogorman@illinois.edu by 9pm Eastern Daylight Time on November 30, 2009. Abstracts will be competitively reviewed. Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by December 31, 2009.