The Randolph-Macon College Departments of Communication Studies and Women’s Studies will host a guest lecturer on March 13, 2019 at 7 p.m. in SunTrust Theater, Brock Commons (304 Henry St.). Map and Directions

Catherine H. Palczewski, professor of communication studies and women’s and gender studies at the University of Northern Iowa, will present “Parades, Pickets, and Prison: Embodied Arguments for Woman Suffrage, 1913-1919.” This event, which is also sponsored by the Committee on Assemblies and Special Events (CASE), is free and open to the public.

This lecture focuses on the verbal and visual responses to anti-suffrage arguments by looking at the following events: the 1913 D.C. Woman Suffrage Parade; the 1917-1919 pickets, protests, and arrests of the Silent Sentinels; and the 1919 Prison Special. Palczewski examines these complex arguments in which women enacted their citizenship while simultaneously exposing their vulnerability to the state and to ostensible male protectors.

Palczewski teaches courses in rhetorical theory and criticism, the rhetoric and performance of social protest, argumentation, gender in communication, and political communication. Her scholarship focuses on how marginalized groups rhetorically construct their messages to gain access to, and be legible in, the dominant public sphere. Her work has appeared in Argumentation and Advocacy, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Studies, NWSA Journal, and The Southern Communication Journal.