The Pannill Center for Rhetoric and Communication

Dynamic and Visible:
The proximity to Pannill Commons and the entrances leading toward the residence halls on the north and the Brown Student Center on the south ensure that students will be constantly moving through this space. Most walls are glass, coupling acoustical privacy with visual exposure that invites participation to the full sweep of activities, from tutoring in Rhetoric to editing The Tiger. Marrying the vibrant intellectual life inside the space with a newly landscaped Chalgrove and a new Dining Terrace above, the Center will be a vibrant hub of the campus.  

Collaborative:
As students move through the Center, they will encounter different sorts of spaces, from private offices to the semi-public Rhetoric studio to the public Ellipse, each which encourages a different form of collaboration. Movable displays enable the programs on the north side—Public History, Student Publications, and Undergraduate Research—to publicize their collaborative projects, from newspapers and literary magazines to poster presentations to digital museum exhibits. Two of the classrooms will be equipped so that students can use the rooms collaboratively to film and produce presentations and videos.  

Comprehensive:
Open twenty four hours a day, the Center will engage every student at the College, from freshmen to seniors, and the space will experience exceptionally high capacity utilization. Every week, 500-600 students will take classes in three of the most attractive classrooms on campus. Courses such as Writing in the Sciences, Business Writing, and Journalism will expand Rhetorical training for students in every discipline. An online app will enable students to reserve rooms to meet, study, interview, practice presentations, edit, collaborate. The College can use the space to host undergraduate conferences that bring students from across the region to our campus.

An office, lounge, and shared computer lab will support four student publications: The Tiger, The Journal of the Sciences, The Garnet, and The Kaleidoscope. Additionally, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review and the Writer's Roundtable will both meet here. The increased visibility, spaces for collaboration, faculty support, and cutting edge technology will all strengthen our student publications and entice more students to join them.

The Center will make student work even more visible to fellow students, visitors, and prospective applicants. Showcasing student work through discussion groups, lectures, and presentations of work-in-progress, it will create a virtuous circle in which students who see their classmates' work will be allured to pursue such work themselves. By being closely situated with Rhetoric, undergraduate research will become fundamentally strengthened by the opportunities in written, spoken, and multimodal communication.

Here students ask How do I communicate the voice of the past? How do I bring historical knowledge to the public? Initially, The Center for Public History will focus on projects in three areas:

1. Digital History: Students will collaborate to create publicly accessible digital archives on a range of topics;
2. The Hampden-Sydney Oral History Project: students will conduct oral histories and create a valuable record of the collective memory and experience of HSC community members and alumni;
3. Archaeology and Historic Preservation: Drawing on Hampden-Sydney's own historic sites and then expanding to others in Virginia and neighboring states, students will bring materials from digs back into the center classroom, where they will learn to analyze artifacts, understand the story, and communicate that story through both physical and virtual exhibits.