A Visit by Rosa Eberly
Richard Colby

In conjunction with the Department of English and the Department of Human Communications, the University Writing Program and Agora sponsored a visit by Rosa Eberly.

Rosa Eberly, an Associate Professor in the departments of Communication Arts and Sciences and English at Penn State University, is a Fellow in Penn's Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy, and the author of Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres as well as articles in Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Rhetoric Review, and New Directions in Public Affairs.

During her visit, Professor Eberly participated in both graduate and undergraduate classes, was interviewed as part of the University Writing Programs informal Writers Studio, gave a public lecture, and finished off her stay with a roundtable discussion and brunch.

Eberly shared her love of writing and public rhetoric that she learned while writing on the college newspaper as an undergraduate.  She admitted that she later found the formal study of composition and rhetoric by accident in graduate school, but her mentors helped her discover the practical importance and responsibility of such study.

In her lecture at DU, "'Quantum Parliaments': Rhetoric, Disciplinarity, and Sustainable Publics," Thursday, April 24, at 4:00 pm in the Renaissance Room, Professor Eberly discussed the importance of public rhetorics.  More than two millennia after Plato put the -ic in rhetoric and more than a century after hair-splitting disciplinarity began to erode the scholarly pursuit of common questions scholars from across the arts and sciences (even physicists) are bringing their "occupational psychoses" to the shared and perduring problems of democracy. What might scholars do to imagine our different roles researchers, teachers, citizens as complementary rather than antagonistic? Eberly examined historical and contemporary cases of how disciplinary differences discouraged or enabled common questions and sustainable publics.  As a way to generate discussion about the importance of public rhetorics, she shared video of recent student protests at Penn State and asked us to think about our own institutional histories and how we might understand these situations.

She ended her stay with a roundtable discussion and brunch on Friday, April 25, at the Womens College.  Entitled Public Studies / Public Citizens," Professor Eberly, faculty, and DU students discussed the relationship between roles as academic interpreters of civic discourse and citizen-participants in it.

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