Public Speaking: Choices and Responsibility

About Christian LundbergWilliam Keith

Christian O. Lundberg is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and co-director of the University Program in Cultural Studies. He also teaches first-year seminar Think Speak Argue which focuses on debate and public speaking skills as pedagogical tools and critical components of democratic life. Dr. Lundberg's current research focuses on theories of the public as a social and discursive form as well as the animating principles for public discourses and identities. His textbooks relate to rhetoric public speaking and public deliberation while his book LACAN IN PUBLIC: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE SCIENCE OF RHETORIC (University of Alabama Press 2012) works through the implications of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis for thinking the rhetorical character of publics as social formations and of the public discourses that circulate within them. In addition Dr. Lundberg has written a number of pieces that unpack forms of discourse constituting specific publics with special attention to the intersection between publics and religious discourse in Islam and evangelical Christianity. He earned a B.A. from the University of Redlands a Master of Divinity from Emory University and a Ph.D. in communication studies from Northwestern University. William Keith is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he supervised the public speaking course for more than a decade. He has taught public speaking for over 40 years at a variety of institutions including the University of Pittsburgh University of Louisville Western Washington University and Oregon State University. In addition to teaching a range of graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric argument and communication theory he has written extensively about the history and significance of public speaking pedagogy in the U.S. context -- especially its connection to democracy and civic education -- for scholarly organizations as well as the Kettering Foundation and the World Bank.