Lisa Zimmerelli (PhD 2009) wins Best Dissertation Award

The American Society for the History of Rhetoric formally awards a recent department alumnus.

Lisa Zimmerelli has won the 2010 Best Dissertation Award from the American Society for the History of Rhetoric.  Her dissertation is entitled “A Genre of Defense: Hyrbidity in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Defense of Women’s Preaching.” The committee supporting what Kent Cartwright calls Zimmerelli’s “tremendous accomplishment” was comprised of the department's Jane Donawerth (director), Jeanne Fahnestock, Shirley Logan, and Leigh Ryan. 

ASHR’s selection committee chair, Claudia Carlos of Carnegie Mellon University, wrote that Zimmerelli’s treatment of women’s rhetoric is “sophisticated,” and conducted with “precision” and “depth.” Additionally, Carlos calls Zimmerelli’s writing style “elegant” and “engaging.”  These honors are fitting, as Zimmerelli was recently appointed Director of the Writing Center at Loyola University, where she is also Assistant Professor of Writing.  She also co-authored The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors (fifth ed.) with Writing Center director, Leigh Ryan.  Zimmerelli’s “A Genre of Defense” also won our department’s own Alice L. Geyser Dissertation Prize in 2009. 

When asked for her feelings on this exciting award, Zimmerelli replied, "I am deeply honored to receive the ASHR dissertation award. Not only does the award recognize my individual work, but by extension, scholarship like it, scholarship that values women's contribution to rhetorical history and considers their religious engagement a worthy site of inquiry. Furthermore, I consider this a collective acheivement, and I am indebted to the support and talents of my committee, all of whom took an active role in mentoring me through this project: Jane Donawerth, Jeanne Fahnestock, Shirley Logan, Leigh Ryan, and Claire Moses [of the University's Women's Studies Department]. This award newly invigorates me to dive back into the dissertation and continue preparing it (and/or segments of it) for publication."

Zimmerelli is following in the footsteps of other department alums; Gary Selby (1995), Robert Sullivan (2000), and Cynthia King (2003) are among ASHR's previous winners.  And according to Kent Cartwright, “This marks the third straight year that dissertations from our Rhetoric and Composition program have won national awards, all from different professional societies.  In 2009 Jonathan Buehl won the Conference on College Composition and Communication Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication, and in 2008 Wendy Hayden won the Rhetoric Society of America's Outstanding Dissertation Award.  It is hard to imagine a greater testament to the superb work of our Writing and Rhetoric faculty than the success of these students.” 

Note on the ASHR Best Dissertation Award:
The American Society for the History of Rhetoric works to “foster the study of rhetoric in all historical periods in American as well as other cultures,” according to their website.  Winners of their annual dissertation prize demonstrate “contribution to the history of rhetorical theory, practice, and/or pedagogy, quality of archival or primary research and contribution to historiographic practice, and quality of writing.”