I am currently soliciting contributions for a collection of essays on performance in nineteenth-century American oratorical cultures. Specifically, I am seeking approaches from a variety of disciplines, including American Studies, Classics, Communications, English, History, Performance Studies, Rhetoric, or interdisciplinary approaches to the relation of performance of performativity to theories, practices, or individuals involved in nineteenth-century American oratory.

Among the current, tentative contributors are Steven Mailloux and Sandra Gustafson.

This project assumes the central importance of public speaking in the lives of peoples living in the Americas in the nineteenth century. Attending to the multiply ways that public speaking was a part of the everyday lives of nineteenth-century Americans, proposed essays in this volume should address the relations among performance, performativity, and the art and practice of public speaking. Moreover, it is my hope that the essays will question the ways that developing notions of American identity (the ways that Americans themselves conceived of and imagined their membership in the nation) were intimately related to public performances of selfhood practiced in public speaking. While these performative notions of American identity were often hegemonic, they were also quite frequently subverted, because they were performed. Thus, I am seeking essays that attend to the many voices and performances that were not immediately recognized within dominant notions of American selfhood, within historical studies of American oratory, or within the hegemonic notions of how an orator should speak and behave on the speaker’s platform, as well as to new approaches to the figures most traditionally associated with nineteenth century American oratory.

I invite completed works or chapter proposals on questions addressing or related to the following topics on nineteenth-century American oratory:

• the orator as performer of national, raced, gendered, classed subjectivities
• specific speeches where the speaker’s performance, not the text, is the focus of the analysis
• space/place as a problematic in public speaking
• "Puritan origins" of ideas about oratory
• oratory’s troubled relation to theater
• examination of performance in reform movements (Temperance, Suffrage, Abolition)
• itinerant speakers and performance
• democracy and performance
• the civic ideal and performance
• public speaking as a mode of self-representation
• performance and 19th century teaching of rhetoric
• receptions of orators
• how attention to performance effects the study of public speaking before 1900
• theorizations of relation of performance to performativity in oratory

Please send essay proposals (250 – 500 words) or completed works (25 pages) and one-page CV’s by July 1, 2004. Completed first drafts of contributions will be expected by September 1, 2004. Email submissions preferred in MS Word attachment. Address all correspondence and/or questions to the address below.