Holy Cross Professor Receives NEH Grant to Study America’s Great Speeches in ‘Oratory’ Project

WORCESTER, Mass. – The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a grant to promote the study of great speeches and public debates in undergraduate humanities classrooms. Patricia Bizzell, chair and professor in the English department at the College of the Holy Cross, serves as one of 16 advisors across different disciplines from colleges across the country on Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project.

The Voices of Democracy Project seeks to reinvigorate the study of U.S. oratory by fostering an understanding of the nation’s principles and history. Its ultimate goal is to promote civic engagement among undergraduate students.

When the Web site is launched in 2008, the Voices of Democracy Project will offer a vast collection of great speeches and debates. The Web site will offer authenticated primary texts, with audio and video versions when available. The material will be organized under seven topic headings: Citizenship, Civil Rights, Freedom of Speech, Religion and Public Life, Social and Economic Justice, Internationalism, and War and Peace.

Bizzell, author of Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993) and co-author of The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001), will be contributing text to the Web site by offering background on speeches, among other things.

"We hope to correct the knowledge deficit about American history and rhetoric and also create excitement among undergraduate students and get them inspired to be activists themselves," Bizzell said.

Bizzell will take part in a workshop in September at the University of Maryland, where the project directors and the advisory board will discuss and plan sample units related to the seven topics.

Bizzell earned her Ph.D. in English literature from Rutgers University in New Jersey. A nationally recognized authority on the teaching of composition, she has lectured and conducted workshops at other institutions and at scholarly meetings. She is an expert on American literature, rhetoric and rhetorical theory, and composition and composition theory. She joined the Holy Cross faculty in 1978.