FSEM 173   Public Sphere Rhetorics and Social Change

Faculty Profile for Professor Spring

Introduces the 2500-year-old field of rhetoric through the study of language as it has shaped the production of knowledge and the reproduction of power. It is particularly interested in the composition and circulation of private and public discourses in the work of social change. Students undertake a scaffolded, step-by-step set of written assignments that build toward and culminate in the presentation of an original research project on the ways rhetoric takes form in current public sphere discourses. Students develop facility with analytic habits of mind, discursive moves typical in academic research writing, and the construction of clear, complex, and logical arguments. Students employ intergroup dialogue as a means to integrate critical analysis and sustained dialogue through guided reflection and anti-bias consciousness raising. Students who successfully complete this seminar receive credit for WRIT 110 and satisfy one half of the human thought and expression areas of inquiry requirement.

Dr. Suzanne B. (b) Spring specializes in 19th-century women's epistolary rhetoric, particularly as it shaped the U.S. and trans-Atlantic abolitionist movement. She employs critical race, class, and queer lenses (often through intergroup dialogue) to her seminars in first-year writing, feminist rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, and digital narrative craft.