While we cannot celebrate the 2020 award winners in person at CCCC 2020,  it is ever more important for us to create space to celebrate each other and our scholarly community. Please join us in celebrating this year’s award winners: Jess Enoch, Cheryl Glenn, Pamela VanHaitsma, & Tobi Jacobi.

2020 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award Winner Jess Enoch for Domestic occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work

We are delighted to announce that the  2020 Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award Winner Jess Enoch for Domestic occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work.

 Domestic Occupations is a feminist rhetorical history exploring women’s complex and changing relationship to the home and how that affected their entry into the workplace. Author Jessica Enoch examines the spatial rhetorics that defined the home in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers how its construction and reconstruction–from discursive description to physical composition–has greatly shaped women’s efforts at taking on new kinds of work. In doing so, Enoch exposes the ways dominant discourses regarding women’s home life and work life–rhetorics that often assumed a white middle-class status–were complicated when differently raced, cultured, and classed women encountered them.Enoch explores how three different groups of women workers–teachers, domestic scientists, and World War II factory employees–contended with the physical and ideological space of the home, examining how this everyday yet powerful space thwarted or enabled their financial and familial security as well as their intellectual engagements and work-related opportunities.

Honorable Mention: Cheryl Glenn for Rhetorical Feminism and this Thing Called Hope

Rhetoric and feminism have yet to coalesce into a singular recognizable field. In Rhetorical Feminism and his Thing Called Hope, author Cheryl Glenn advances the feminist rhetorical project by introducing a new theory of rhetorical feminism. Clarifying how feminist rhetorical practices have given rise to this innovative approach, Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope equips the field with tools for a more expansive and productive dialogue. Glenn’s rhetorical feminism offers an alternative to hegemonic rhetorical histories, theories, and practices articulated in Western culture. This alternative theory engages, addresses, and supports feminist rhetorical practices that include openness, authentic dialogue and deliberation, interrogation of the status quo, collaboration, respect, and progress.

Honorable Mention: Pamela VanHaitsma for Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education.

In Queering Romantic Engagement, Pamela VanHaitsma complicates and nuances the way that we read same-sex letters sent in the 19th century. VanHaitsma uses letter writing manuals and other epistolary advice to re-read the romantic correspondence of free-born African American women Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus as well as the multigenre epistolary rhetoric of Yale student Albert Dodd. These case studies look across gender, race, class, and educational background as they also explore 19th century concepts of sexuality and romantic engagement. Both sets of correspondence reveal the multiple ways in which the letter writers incorporate but also queer cultural norms and cultural conventions. Queering our rhetorical readings of these texts raises important ways of re-thinking and re-viewing 19th century texts.

Nancy A. Myers Feminist Research Grant Award: Tobi Jacobi

The winner of this year’s Nancy A. Myers Feminist Research Grant Award goes to Dr. Tobi Jacobi of Colorado State University. Jacobi’s research will explore the literacy opportunities and rhetorical practices available for girls at the New York State Training School for Girls from 1904 to 1935. The training school was a residential reformatory school for girls 12-16 who were convicted of juvenile delinquency. Jacobi’s research focuses on writings such as letters, captioned photos, and reports penned by incarcerated girls, school staff and administrators, friends, and family that counternarrate much of the institutionally archived documentation of girls experiencing Progressive Era “training” at the school. Using a blend of archival and qualitative methods, the project will articulate “critical feminist rhetorical analysis with an emphasis on contemporary remix and circulation that calls attention to the neglected and suppressed voices of prisoners; by thinking across time and space, it values opportunities for both scholars and contemporary confined writers to work with archival documents and challenge monologic historical narratives.” The Feminist Research Grant Award will fund Jacobi’s travel to the Training School site as well as the New York State Archives.

We want to thank our MANY volunteers who reviewed nominations and award applications. All of our award committees are coordinated by Lisa Mastrangelo. The Winifred Bryan Horner Book Award committee included Lisa Mastrangelo (Chair), Hui Wu, Corey Geraths, Evan Groundwater, and Alicia Brazeau. The Nancy A. Myers Feminist Research Grant committee included the following volunteers: Lisa Shaver (chair), Andrea Lunsford, Jenn Fishman, Tammie Kennedy, and Denise Landrum-Geyer. Join us in thanking these coalition members for their generous service.