The Nordic Network for the History of Rhetoric was founded in December 1999 by Pernille Harsting (Denmark). The Network is administered by a steering group composed by Pernille Harsting (president, Denmark), Stefan Ekman (vice president, Sweden), Sissel Høisæter (Norway), and Tua Korhonen (Finland).

It is the purpose of the NNRH (= Nordisk Netværk for Retorikkens Historie) to support the development of Nordic scholarship and research collaboration in the history of rhetoric, and to further the internationalisation of Nordic research in this field. The NNRH aims to achieve this by arranging conferences and symposia, by engaging Nordic scholars in the international research environment, and by making Nordic studies available to an international audience.
 
The NNRH has 120 members from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The Network's hitherto four Nordic conferences took place in Copenhagen, Denmark (2000), Helsinki, Finland (2002), Gothenburg, Sweden (2004), and Kolding, Denmark (2008); click here for a list of the papers presented at the Copenhagen, Helsinki, Gothenburg, and Kolding conferences. The upcoming fifth conference of the NNRH, on New Nordic Research on the History of Rhetoric, will be held at the University College of Skövde, Sweden, November 19-21, 2009. For information about the Skövde conference, which is hosted by Stefan Ekman and Pernille Harsting, see <http://www.nnrh.dk>.
 
In November 2008 the NNRH published volume two in the Network's series of "Nordic Studies in the History of Rhetoric" (for information about the series, see <http://www.nnrh.dk/NSHR/index.html>. The volume, Rhetoric and Literature in Finland and Sweden, 1600-1900, edited by Pernille Harsting and Jon Viklund, is available both as a free-access web book (see <http://www.nnrh.dk/NSHR/nshr2/index.html> and in a number of printed 'preservation copies' (which have been donated to research and university libraries in Europe, Canada, and USA). The book contains eight studies by Finnish and Swedish scholars, focusing on Neo-Latin epideictic literature in Finland, the foundation of a rhetoricized vernacular literature in Sweden, and the 'anti-rhetorical' literature of Swedish Sentimentalism and pre-Romanticism.

The first volume of the series, Ten Nordic Studies in the History of Rhetoric, edited by Pernille Harsting and Stefan Ekman, was published in printed form only and is be found in a number of scholarly libraries in Europe, Canada, and the USA. The contributors to the volume are scholars from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. The volume covers a wide range of topics in the field: from the cultivation of anti-theoretical rhetoric in tenth-century Russia to the cult of body language in twentieth-century Denmark; from the enthusiastic rediscovery of ancient rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance to the moralistic rejection of rhetorical effects in early Swedish novels; and from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's rhetoric of aesthetics to Henry David Thoreau's rhetoric of ethics and civil action. (Go to more info about the book. Go to order form.)