Shirley Logan Awarded Distinguished Service Award
July 08, 2020
Professor Shirley Logan was awarded the Rhetoric Society of America 2020 RSA George E. Yoos Distinguished Service Award.
The George E. Yoos Distinguished Service Award is presented biennially to a member of the Society who has made significant and sustained contributions to RSA and to the field. The award is named in honor of George Yoos, a founding member of RSA, who served as founding editor of Rhetoric Society Quarterly from 1975-1986 and as Executive Secretary from 1986-1995. Winners of the George E. Yoos Award, which automatically confers the status of Fellow, meet the criteria for Rhetoric Society Fellows and have made sustained contributions that have improved the Society.
Logan’s monographs, We are Coming and Liberating Language, and her edited anthology With Pen and Voice are pathbreaking contributions to rhetorical historiography. Her books and articles shaped the fields of African-American and feminist rhetorical historiography. One nomination letter notes that Logan “helped to change the landscape of our field” and make possible work in rhetorical studies that would have been unimaginable without her. As co-editor of the Southern Illinois University Press series “Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms,” Logan provided concrete pathways for others to follow in extending feminist rhetorical history and advanced the place of feminist work within rhetorical studies. Logan has been a leader in our field in multiple capacities across many societies.
She served as president of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition from 1998-2000, as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 2003, as a member of the executive committee of the MLA Division on the History of Rhetoric and Composition from 2000 to 2005, and as a member of the RSA Board of Directors from 2014 to 2017. She helped form the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies and served as RSA’s representative to ARS for a time. As one of her nominators notes, “Prof. Logan has been a leading figure in shaping RSA’s course at the start of the 21st century.” Another concludes, “It takes enormous persistence, energy, and devotion to rhetorical studies to sustain such a record of scholarly productivity and heroic service.” The selection committee (Lisa Corrigan, Bryan McCann, Christa Olson, and Ersula Ore) determined that such devotion, intellect, and leadership make Shirley Wilson Logan an ideal recipient of the George E. Yoos Award.