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Louise Knight

Visiting Scholar

Louise W. Knight is a Visiting Scholar with the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. Her areas of specialization in the discipline of history are nineteenth-century American social activism and intellectual history, with concentrations in biography, the antebellum abolition and women's rights movement, the progressive era, and the history of grassroots organizing. Her areas of specialization in the discipline of rhetoric are nineteenth-century radical rhetoric and the rhetoric of social protest. From 1999 to 2010, she was an Adjunct Professor (Rhetoric) in the Department of Communication Studies. Knight is the author of Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Jane Addams: Spirit in Action (W.W. Norton, 2010).  Her published articles include “John Dewey and Jane Addams Debate War,” in Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice, Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark, eds. (2014), “Love on Halsted Street: A Contemplation on Jane Addams,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams, Maurice Hamington, ed. (2010), and Jane Addams’s Theory of Cooperation,” in Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy, Marilyn Fischer et al, eds. (2009).  Her forthcoming book, American Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké and the  Fight for Human Rights, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in 2023. For more information see her website, www.louisewknight.com