Walker Gibson (1919-2009) was Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1967 to 1987. He served as Director of the Rhetoric Program, the forerunner to the present Writing Program. He also began, in 1970, our doctoral program in Composition and Rhetoric Studies. Nationally, he was active in the National Council of Teachers of English, serving as President in 1973. Gibson was the author of numerous poems, essays, and books, including Tough, Sweet, & Stuffy: An Essay on Modern American Prose Styles. Gibson’s papers are part of the UMass Special Collections and University Archives.
In addition to the annual lecture, we also honor Professor Gibson through the annual Walker Gibson Prize for best graduate student essay on a topic in composition and rhetoric written in an English Department seminar during the preceding year. Funding for both the Lecture and the Prize come from the UMass Amherst English Department and the University Writing Program.
Gibson Lectures
2023: Annette Vee, Associate Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh, "Automating Writing from Automata to AI"
2022: Sharon Yam, Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, University of Kentucky, "Cultivating Transnational Coalitional Subjectivity: Tension, Barriers, and Tactics in the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Movement"
2021: Blake Scott, Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, University of Central Florida, "Theory Building with Participants in Rhetoric of Health & Medicine (RHM) Research"
2020: Gibson lecture canceled due to Covid-19
2019: Steve Parks, Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, University of Virginia, "Steps Toward Justice: From Syracuse to Syria"
2018: Eric Darnell Pritchard, Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “‘Crucibles of Difference’: Community Literacies, Black Queer Feminisms, and Activist-Rhetorical Education, 1974-1990” (abstract)
2017: Catherine Chaput, Associate Professor of English, University of Nevada Reno, “Foucault & the Rhetorical Efficiency of Truth-Telling”
2016: Debra Hawhee, McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation, Penn State University, "Beast Fables, Deliberative Rhetoric, and the Progymnasmata"
2015: LuMing Mao, Professor at Miami Univeristy, Ohio, "The Rhetoric of the Other: Re-Presenting Facts of Nonusage."
2014: Kristie Fleckenstein, Professor of English at Florida State University, "'A cartoonist shall blunt his barb': Reading (Anti)Suffrage Caricature within Its Visual Media Ecology."
2013: Min-Zhan Lu, Professor of English at the University of Louisville, and Bruce Horner, Professor and Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville,“Translingual Literacy, Language Difference, and Matters of Agency.”
2012: Peter Mortensen, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Manufacturing Illiteracy in the United States, 1880-1930”
2011: Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English at Stanford University, “Rhetoric and New Media: Writing and the 21st Century University”
2010: Neal Lerner, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "One Hundred Years in Holyoke: The Life and Death of Educational Reform"
2009: Adam J. Banks, Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at Syracuse University, “The Scholar-Activist as Digital Griot: Reimagining Roles, Relationships, and Rhetorical Practices in Community Engagement”
2008: Deborah L. Brandt, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Status of Writing”
2007: Catherine Prendergast, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “’We Live and Learn’: English and Ambivalence in a New Capitalist State”
2006: Elaine Richardson, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, “Jezebel, Lil’ Kim or Kimberly Jones and African American Women’s Language and Literacy Practices”
2005: John Trimbur, Professor of English at Emerson College, “Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English”
2004: Cynthia Selfe, Professor of English at Michigan Technological Institute, and Gail Hawisher, Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Collaborative Configurations: Researching the Literacies of Technology”
2003: Keith Gilyard, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, “Toward Critical Ethnicity in Academic and Popular Culture”
2001: Gesa Kirsch, Professor of English at Bentley College, "Promises Made, Promises Broken? Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research"