Dear rhetorician,

In Europe research and teaching in rhetoric has been steadily increasing in the last decades. However our work in rhetoric seems to have been confined to separate nations or regions without much contact between different European research communities.

Fortunately this is changing. We are meeting each other at conferences, we are exchanging ideas, and we are planning European research projects.

Perhaps the most telling example of this development is the website you are visiting now: The homepage of the newly established Rhetoric Society of Europe (RSE).

The Rhetoric Society of Europe (RSE) is an organization for European researchers and teachers working on the art of rhetoric. We already have well over hundred members and are steadily growing. The purpose of RSE is to promote and advance the research, study and teaching of rhetoric in Europe, and to facilitate professional cooperation between our members.

Even though it is an important aim of the RSE to stimulate the communities of Europe, we welcome members from all parts of the world. The RSE not only wishes to improve and enhance European research, but also to facilitate international cooperation. You can read the short history of the society here.

Presently the most important tool to achieve our goals is our homepage, which contains information about rhetoricians in Europe, study programmes, journals, organisations and conferences.

We have only begun this work and invite everyone to provide more information about events, publications and institutions in your own countries.  We also encourage you to take advantage of our Forum, which is meant to be a place for RSE members and other interested in the study of Rhetoric to ask and answer questions as well as debate topics related to rhetorical studies.

We also aim to establish a European journal for the study of rhetoric, and have already begun the preliminary work in this important endeavour.

In January 2013 the fourth Rhetoric in Society Conference will be organized in Copenhagen. During the conference RSE will hold its first General Assembly and adopt the Constitution and Bylaws for our organization.  We hope to see you all there. The number of attendees has more or less doubled with every conference, so there is no doubt that both the conference and the society serves an important purpose.

This new reality, I am certain, will help support and connect the growing and flourishing rhetoric communities in Europe.

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Jens E. Kjeldsen

President of The Rhetoric Society of Europe