2017 NCA Award Winners
NCA’s annual awards will be bestowed on several distinguished members at the Annual Convention in Dallas. Below is the list of those who will be honored at the NCA Presidential Address and Awards Presentation.
Teaching Awards
Donald H. Ecroyd Award for Outstanding Teaching in Higher Education
Professor Betsy W. Bach is selected to receive the 2017 Donald H. Ecroyd Award in recognition of her outstanding career dedicated to excellence in communication, teaching, and learning. Professor Bach's accomplishments are manifold. As a stellar teacher and mentor, she has made significant contributions in her classes; notably in her work supporting novice teachers as they begin their teaching careers. As an administrator, her pedagogical leadership has influenced high-level, campus-wide and national conversations about communication and instruction. It should not go without saying that Professor Bach is an exceptional scholar as well, and (impressively) has achieved scholarly success while simultaneously dedicating herself to excellence in teaching and mentoring. As described in one of her nominating letters, Professor Bach's career is one that has influenced countless students in all aspects of their professional lives; her legacy can be seen in the many, many students--past and present--who strive to emulate who she is as a teacher and mentor.
Marcella E. Oberle Award for Outstanding Teaching in Grades K-12
For over 50 years, Sarah Rosenberg has infused passion into student speech, debate, and theatre. She has lifted up those in the most challenging of communities, instilling in them discipline and belief, and taking them to the highest levels of excellence.
Sarah began teaching at Maclay Junior High School, in Pacoima, California, in 1968. Pacoima was classified as a dangerous, drug- and gang-entrenched community. Undaunted, Sarah gave the students a voice to effect change—and the confidence to believe that they could. Together they created Dreams Over Drugs, which sent Maclay students to perform and speak to elementary schools, urging them to say no to drugs. This effort was celebrated and promoted by the California Senate, U.S. Congress, and the United Nations.
Sarah’s students and teams have earned innumerable state and national accolades. She built powerhouse programs at Maclay and Cleveland HS in southern California, at I.S. 184 in the South Bronx, and at Bronx Preparatory Community Charter, where she pioneered programs at 15 Democracy Prep Charters. Sarah’s ingenuity and work ethic are focused solely on her students’ advancement—never on her own.
Many of her students have recounted their experience in forensics echoing a common sentiment: “Speech saved my life.”
An accomplished classroom teacher, speech coach, drama director, summer institute instructor, and speech organization leader, Ms. Simon is a true example of a dedicated educator. Her lifetime of coaching and mentoring her students is exemplified not only by her over 30 national champions, but also by her 15 school, state, and national awards and recognitions.
Ms. Simon established programs at the junior high school and high school levels across the country, in various socioeconomic and cultural contexts. Her work in oral communication began at Lincoln High School (CA) in the 1970s. In 1980, Milton Academy (MA) recruited her, where she continues to teach and benefit the lives of her students.
Former students state she takes oral communication from a strictly classroom subject to a skill level that is used daily in an increasingly communicative world. Ms. Simon taught us “to share [our] stories and speeches as a gift.” Her instruction in “Speech and Debate changed performers’ and audiences’ lives”.
One former student compared Ms. Simon and himself to Shel SilverStein’s “The Giving Tree”. He stated growing up under the generosity, thoughtfulness and kindness of a wise tree…I was that child, Debbie Simon the tree.”
Michael and Suzanne Osborn Community College Outstanding Educator Award
Wade Hescht is a very innovative and challenging professor. He has superb teaching skills and a rare and excellent ability to interact with students and make them see that they should care about their work. He has taught community college classes for two decades, keeping high standards in all of them. His scholarship can be seen clearly in his coaching résumé. Wade has helped shape competitive forensics, not only in the state of Texas, but in the nation as well. He also consistently coaches students who nationally rank in the top five yearly at the Phi Rho Pi National Speech and Debate Tournament. He is active, not only in the National Communication Association, but also the Texas Speech Communication Association, Phi Rho Pi, Texas Intercollegiate Forensics Association, and Texas Community College Forensics Association. He does all of this while actively coaching and serving as Chair of his Division. He is a superb representative of our profession.
Wallace A. Bacon Lifetime Teaching Excellence Award
NCA Past President Raymie McKerrow describes himself as a “farm boy from Montana. Whatever else I am or have become, I will always remain tied to the land.” Given the expansiveness of Raymie’s teaching impact, it is clear he will also always remain tied to those he has taught. Raymie retired from the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University in 2015 after 50 years of modeling the role of teacher-scholar. Nominators, all former students, noted how Raymie’s strong commitment to diversity and inclusion has now seeped far beyond the classroom as he has stewarded so many “others” into the academy as well as how his students have moved into different areas of Communication – a testament to his ability to make critical rhetoric relevant beyond disciplinary silos. As one writer noted: “I always knew I was book smart, I earned good grades and scored well on standardized tests, but being in Ray’s class made me feel smart. [...] It is a testament to his teaching that he is able to masterfully manage class and discussion so that students are speaking and thinking in a manner that actually makes them feel intelligent. It is a true gift to give anyone.” The Awards committee was especially impressed with Raymie’s scholarship (including his textbook Principles and Types of Speech Communication/ Public Speaking—now in its 16th edition), the warmth of his relationships with students, his special care for those who were hurting or somehow on the margins, and the three awards named in his honor that highlight the accomplishments of undergraduates.
Scholarship Awards
Bernard J. Brommel Award for Outstanding Scholarship or Distinguished Service in Family Communication
Douglas Kelley was a founding leader of the Family Communication Division and has provided academic leadership in family communication for more than two decades. Kelley was recently named the Lincoln Professor of Relationship Ethics at Arizona State University. Professor Kelley’s research on the communication of forgiveness has been path breaking. He published the first empirical study on this topic in the late 1990s and has built on that work with a steady stream of books, chapters, and articles. This work foreshadowed the “positive communication” movement and helped researchers conceptualize forgiveness as a communication process, leading to recognition in 2014 of Communicating Forgiveness as the outstanding scholarly book on family communication. Professor Kelley is unique in sharing his gifts as a family communication teacher and researcher with underserved communities. For example, Kelley’s long-standing service learning course, taught extra-to-load, connects communication students with a community center serving lower income families. He fully embodies the qualities imagined by the Brommel Award.
Charles H. Woolbert Research Award
For their article “Postcolonial Approaches to Communication: Charting the Terrain, Engaging the Intersections," published in Communication Theory 12(2002): 249-270.
Diamond Anniversary Book Award
For her book Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation (University Press of Mississippi, 2016).
In Prison Power, Lisa Corrigan explores connections between the rise of mass incarceration and the Civil Rights Movement to consider how tensions of confinement and emancipation shaped activists' visions of freedom. Professor Corrigan analyzes the writings of three prominent authors, H. Rap Brown, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur. In these analyses, she explicates critical questions of identity, gender, race, and power, considering the ways in which these authors drew on their experiences of marginalization and oppression to diagnose social issues and articulate compelling alternatives. Professor Corrigan's book illuminates an important aspect of U.S. history and speaks to the present day, as we continue to confront the issues faced by Brown, Abu-Jamal, and Shakur. Professor Corrigan's study underscores how policies of mass incarceration effectively target people of color and how America may begin to reimagine productive relations across difference in our diverse society.
For her book Urban Renewal and Resistance: Race, Space, and the City in the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books, 2016).
Mary Triece’s Urban Renewal and Resistance: Race, Space, and the City in the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-First Century is timely, interdisciplinary, and well-argued. Through a series of case studies that explores neoliberalism via geography, land use, public policy analysis, gentrification, and citizen science and activism in Detroit and Harlem, Triece melds communicative analysis with urban studies and the study of race. The book’s main theme, illuminating the discursive practices that shape urban communities, will resonate across the discipline. Overall, Urban Renewal and Resistance is a highly readable and relevant text about an important topic, one that offers strong historical, theoretical, and engaged contributions about race, gentrification, and urban spaces.
Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award
For her essay, “Health Becomes You: (Re)Presenting Data Collection via Health Surveillance Technologies in the Era of Big Data”
The Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award recognizes the top-ranked student-authored paper from all NCA units that competitively rank papers for programming at the NCA Annual Convention. The author provides a well written, engaging and timely study about the latest fad in fitness. Using surveillance and biopower literature, the author provides a skillful critical analysis of Fitbit marketing. An in-depth analysis of the discourse and power dynamics surrounding the marketing of this self-monitoring health technology provides scholars of critical digital health scholarship with a solid research trajectory. In the midst of fierce competition, the author’s use of a clear framework, strong discussion and exemplary writing proved to clearly be the 2017 winner of the Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award. Well deserved. Congratulations!
Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award
Debra Hawhee, at The Pennsylvania State University, is McCourtney Professor of Civic Deliberation, Professor of English, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation. Her trailblazing scholarship on rhetoric and the body/sensorium, and most recently inclusive of the posthuman, exhibits dazzling inventiveness and intellectual creativity. Grounded in the classical and modern rhetorical traditions, her work serves as a critical touchstone for rhetorical scholars working in multiple arenas, from visuality to historiography, from ancient rhetorical theory to contemporary performance. Her first book, Bodily Arts, is a groundbreaking study of the overlap between athletics and rhetoric in ancient Greece; her second, Moving Bodies, delves deeply into Kenneth Burke’s insights that human beings are “bodies that learn language” and “symbol-using animals”; and her third, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, boldly intervenes in the vibrant scholarly conversations about nonhuman animals and the posthuman. In these widely cited books, as well as in many influential essays and book chapters, Professor Hawhee skillfully blends classical and contemporary rhetorics and provocatively challenges and changes the ways that we think about, write about, and teach rhetoric.
Gerald M. Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship
In addition to his duties as Dean of his college, Matthew W. Seeger’s research in crisis communication, particularly that related to health-related crises, has received over $5 million in external funding and placed him in highly visible and influential positions within federal and international health organizations (e.g., World Health Organization, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). From this research, Seeger has authored or co-authored a significant number of books, book chapters, and journal articles that place communication as a theoretical explanation for developing and implementing crisis applications. Seeger's ability to create a direct path from research to application is a hallmark of his record.
Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Awards
For her dissertation completed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “From Childless by Choice to Mother: Performative and Subversive Negotiations of Face in Relational Communication about (Never) Having Children.”
Advisor: Dawn O. Braithwaite
The dissertation centers on women who previously indicated a desire to remain childless by choice and then became a mother due to circumstance or choice. Focusing on the how these mothers negotiated face in personal relationships, the dissertation developed and employed Performative Face Theory, which extends Goffman’s theory of face by placing in in conversation with Judith Bulter’s poststructural theory of performativity. In doing so, the dissertation speaks to operations of power in the communicative identity negotiations of women. The findings and theoretical landscape of this study have clear implications for a critical turn in interpersonal and family communication scholarship.
For her dissertation completed at Rutgers University, “Applying Design Science to Address Health System Problems: A Case of Designing Communication to Manage Clinician Anonymity in an Academic Hospital”
Advisor: Mark Aakhus
This innovative and relevant applied dissertation research project developed an important evidence-based health information technology (HIT) application that promotes effective inter-professional communication between hospital-based clinicians by encouraging teamwork and the sharing of relevant health information. The study employed a rigorous user-centered design methodology that guided iterative development of a powerful digital communication application that fits the unique needs of the hospital and health care providers who represent multiple professional areas.
For his dissertation completed at University of Maryland, College Park, “The Educational Imaginary in Radical Reconstruction: Congressional Public Policy Rhetoric and American Federalism, 1862-1872”
Advisor: Trevor Parry-Giles
This dissertation embodies the best qualities of scholarship in rhetorical histories. It vivifies the post-Civil War debates on education for contemporary audiences, producing a dissertation of interest for both those embedded in that historical juncture and those who are not. It offers a compelling conceptual innovation with the "educational imaginary." It highlights the tensions between rhetoric and policymaking in educational issues that still haunts us today.
Golden Anniversary Monograph Award
For her article, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis” published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102 (2016): 166-193.
Dr. Allison M. Prasch is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Minnesota and teaches a variety of classes in rhetorical studies, including Rhetoric & Western Thought, Historical Speeches on American Issues, and Evaluating Contemporary Rhetoric. Dr. Prasch is a scholar of U.S. presidential rhetoric, and her research program connects methods of close textual analysis and archival research with contemporary scholarship on space/place and public memory to interrogate the relationship between oratorical texts and their physical, spatial, and historical contexts. Dr. Prasch’s research has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, the Southern Communication Journal, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Voices of Democracy. Her current book project examines how Cold War U.S. presidents linked their foreign policy objectives to particular geographical locations and, in so doing, extended the United States’ physical and metaphorical presence in the world during key moments in the Cold War struggle between democracy and communism.
James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address
For her book, Infertility: Tracing the History of a Transformative Term (Penn State University Press, 2016)
Professor Jensen's book is exceptional in its rhetorical contextualization, its breath and depth of primary and secondary sources, as well in its advancement of a theory of science narratives. Her book not only makes significant contributions to feminist rhetoric, the rhetoric of science, and how we understand the rhetoric of history, but it also makes contributions to disciplines outside of rhetorical studies. Indeed, her book is an exemplary work of transdisciplinary work.
James L. Golden Outstanding Student Essay in Rhetoric Award
For her essay, “Framing the (Un)Grievable American Citizen: Black Precarity and the Katrina Event”
Emma Dulaney’s winning paper, “Framing the (Un)Grievable American Citizen: Black Precarity and the Katrina Event,” grows out of work she completed for her senior honor’s thesis at Whitman College.
Ms. Dulaney analyzed 53 images from an online photo exhibit that depicted events in 2005 during and after Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans levee breaches. Her paper is an exemplar of theoretical sophistication, close textual reading, clear, lucid argumentation, and compelling prose. But the work also warrants high praise for its ability to explain how photographic representations of public memory can influence our understandings of race.
Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award
Professor Bryan McCann’s proposed book project “The Idea of the Negro”: Debating Black Protest Fiction after the Harlem Renaissance is timely and ambitious as it explores key figures and debates surrounding black protest fiction from the years 1937 to 1964. The Wallace Award will enable Professor McCann to complete archival research as he seeks to explore two areas of inquiry: the “object of blackness” and “the nature of fiction itself.” The project is well described, with a convincing rationale for the importance of visiting archives, and comes with the support of four former Wallace Award winners. As one of his nominees noted, “Professor McCann’s proposed exploration of clash over the responsibilities of the Black artist in the public sphere . . . promises not only to yield some significant rhetorical history and a contribution to social movement studies in the field and beyond, but will also challenge certain orthodoxies in the praxis of rhetorical criticism and public address as they concern race.”
Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance
Matthew Spangler, a scholar-artist-teacher of the first-rank, has an impressive and expanding list of accomplishments for the stage, including a recent award-winning production of Albatross, his solo-play play based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which has been presented off-Broadway at 59E59, in Boston at the Poet's Theatre and at the New Repertory Theatre, at the Arizona Theatre Company in Phoenix, and in Edinburgh. The performances won two prestigious Elliot Norton Theatre Awards in 2015 (Best Solo Show and Best Production by a small theatre). His adaptations of Khaled Hosseini’s and T. C. Boyle’s fiction movingly address issues of immigration, poverty, the plight of refugees, and environmental destruction. His play adapted from The Kite Runner has received 14 productions at major theatres across North America, the UK, and Israel, the most recent being an 6-month-long run on London’s West End, followed by a UK-wide tour. Spangler has also received three major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create live performance work with a group of nationally selected participants on the theme of immigration to California. Matthew Spangler's body of work is distinguished for the deep humanity and ethical sensibility he brings to life on stage and through his incisive scholarship. His work moves across boundaries of nationality, race, and culture to create narratives of compassion and empathy transcending difference.
Lilla A. Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Interpretation and Performance Studies
John S. Gentile is being presented with the 2017 Heston Award both for his 2014 article on the performance of the Gawain poem and for more than three decades of work as a scholar-artist. The article exemplifies with deftness, insight, and great scholarly care how literary criticism, folkloric research, and aesthetic considerations all converge for the performance of this canonical work. In addition to this specific text, the committee wishes to acknowledge the consistent level of superior scholarship achieved by Professor Gentile, from the publication of his book Cast of One (1989), one of the first book-length monographs in performance studies published by a university press, to his role as co-founder of Storytelling, Self, and Society, the first and what still remains the only journal devoted to the scholarly study of storytelling as a performing art, to his work across years as solo performer, director, and adaptor, whose work has been recognized internationally. His career as scholar-artist indeed embodies the goals and purposes of the Heston Award.
Mark L. Knapp Award in Interpersonal Communication
The Mark L. Knapp Award in Interpersonal Communication recognizes Dr. Brian H. Spitzberg’s remarkable career as a scholar, mentor, and teacher. Spitzberg’s research on interpersonal competence and the “dark side” of interpersonal communication broke new ground in the field, and continues to influence contemporary interpersonal communication research. Spitzberg has demonstrated extraordinary scholarly productivity throughout his career. In addition to over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, and over 70 invited articles, scholarly monographs, and book chapters, Spitzberg has written four books and edited five more. He has also authored numerous books and book chapters on communication pedagogy. Spitzberg’s has also been the co-principal investigator on large-scale interdisciplinary grant projects funded by the National Science Foundation. Recognizing Spitzberg’s outstanding scholarship, he has received several book, article, and career awards from scholarly associations, including, most recently, the 2015 Gerald R. Miller Book Award from NCA’s Interpersonal Communication Division. Spitzberg has also mentored many of the disciplines’ brightest scholars, having served as the chair or a member of nearly 200 thesis/dissertation committees. Spitzberg has also demonstrated a commitment to community service as an invited speaker and expert consultant. Spitzberg is a gifted and influential teacher as well, which is evidenced by the multiple university-wide teaching awards he has received during his time at San Diego State. For his many contributions and achievements, Spitzberg is well-deserving of the Knapp Award.
Stephen E. Lucas Debut Publication Award
For her article, “Jamming Market Rhetoric in Wisconsin's 2011 Labor Protests,” published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13 (2016): 250-268.
Yvonne Slosarski’s article makes a significant contribution to the discussion about culture jamming and politics and does so in a compelling and approachable way. The author provided insightful analysis of the labor protests, while convincing the reader to consider an alternative view of culture jamming. Moreover, the author makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the rhetorical uses of space, as well. The nominator writes of this piece: “This essay exemplifies the best of rhetorical criticism: it engages closely with a text, usefully illuminating its rhetorical features, while also gesturing toward larger implications of this textual analysis that might apply to other cases.” The committee agreed, noting the author’s careful balance between rhetorical analysis and theoretical discussion. The piece is timely, original, and sophisticated. As such, it should appeal to a wide readership within (and outside of) communication studies.
Service Awards
Samuel L. Becker Distinguished Service Award
Dr. Dawn Braithwaite has been an influential force in our organization, our discipline, and our profession. It’s impossible to elaborate upon all of Dawn’s contributions over the years. But, it is possible to express our profound gratitude to Dawn for her service to over 65 global, national, and regional committees/boards, her editorial activities, her 10 books, and over 100 scholarly publications. Of particular note is her leadership as president of both WSCA and NCA—two positions that required eight years of ongoing engagement, sensitivity, and passion. As one of her supporting letters attests: “If one charts her extensive list of NCA service from 1993-2016, Dr. Braithwaite has served on one and often multiple NCA committees for every year of her entire career!”
Although Dawn’s service and scholarship are visible to many, it’s what she has undertaken behind the scenes that are particularly of note. She was a founding member of the Disability Issues Caucus and a catalyst for ensuring gender equity in various NCA awards, among other pivotal work. And, we can’t begin to count the thousands of hours she has dedicated to mentoring current teacher-scholars who are found in this room today and who now sit around our disciplinary table because of her advice and expertise.
Sam Becker was a colleague who served without expecting anything back. Dawn Braithwaite has continued this admirable ethic and NCA is a better organization because of her tireless commitment and dedication to other-centeredness.
Distinguished Scholar Awards
Ronald C. Arnett is Chair and Professor of the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University, where he holds The Patricia Doherty Yoder and Ronald Wolfe Endowed Chair in Communication Ethics, and previously held the Henry Koren, C.S.Sp. Endowed Chair for Scholarly Excellence (2010–2015). Dr. Arnett’s scholarly work has been foundational to three areas of communication scholarship: (1) Philosophy of Communication; (2) Communication Ethics; and (3) Communication and Religion. He is widely recognized as a leading voice in each of these areas. He is the author/coauthor of 11 books and co‐editor of four books. He is the sole author of five university press books, three of which have won book awards. His most recent book is Levinas’s Rhetorical Demand: The Unending Obligation of Communication Ethics (Southern Illinois University Press). Over his long and continuously productive career, Dr. Arnett has been the recipient of six book awards. These include the 2013 Top Book Award for Communication Ethics in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Rhetoric of Warning and Hope from the Communication Ethics Division of the National Communication Association; the 2013 Everett Lee Hunt Award for Outstanding Scholarship for his book An Overture to Philosophy of Communication: The Carrier of Meaning; and the 2013 Top Book Award from the Philosophy of Communication Division of the National Communication Association for An Overture to Philosophy of Communication: The Carrier of Meaning (with Annette Holba). He was also the recipient of the 2013 Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarship from Duquesne University, and he received the 2005 Scholar of the Year Award from the Religious Communication Association. Dr. Arnett was named both Centennial Scholar of Communication and Centennial Scholar of Philosophy of Communication by the Eastern Communication Association in 2009. He is currently serving his third editorship for the Journal of Communication and Religion and is a former editor of the Review of Communication.
François Cooren is one of the chief proponents of the Montreal School of Organizational Communication, which focuses on Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO). In this approach, communication is seen as the central building block of organizing and organization; it is more than mere conduit or epiphenomenon. In his first book, The Organizing Property of Communication, published in 2000, Dr. Cooren showed how communicative acts constitute the key building blocks of organizational processes. He has been among the first in the field to call into question the traditional divide between materiality and discourse, a position he defends through the meticulous analysis of organizational life. The CCO approach is now an official sub-theme of the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS), which is the most respected European academic association devoted to organizational studies. Given Dr. Cooren’s expertise in discourse analysis, especially narratology, speech act theory, semiotics, and conversation analysis, his work has also become influential in communication theory, language and social interaction, and pragmatics. In the past 20 years, Dr. Cooren has become a prodigious and decorated scholar. He has written or edited eight books, 57 refereed articles, and 40 book chapters or invited papers. He is an ICA Fellow who has received six distinguished awards for his research, articles, and books, four from the National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division. These awards include: Outstanding Textbook, Best Edited book, Best Book, and Best Article. Management Communication Quarterly awarded him Best Article, and he received ICA’s Young Scholar Award in 2002, and the Frederic M. Jablin Memorial Award. In addition to being a regular participant at NCA conferences in two of its divisions (Organizational Communication and Language and Social Interaction), Dr. Cooren is a past president of the International Communication Association, president of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis, and former editor of Communication Theory.
Sandra Petronio is an important scholar and theorist of substance, with wide influence in the Communication discipline and beyond. She is best known for Communication Privacy Management theory (CPM), a scientifically grounded theory to understand the central motivations, goals, rules, and outcomes of privacy management. CPM is robust, with 5,076 citations since 2012 on Google Scholar, and more than 740 articles engaging the theory. Dr. Petronio and her colleagues continue to develop evidence of consistencies and distinct patterns of privacy management emerging across cultures and contexts, suggesting the opportunity to develop a general theory. Dr. Petronio has won a number of significant awards for her research career and her 2002 book, Boundaries of Privacy. CPM has a global reach, with the engagement of scholars from Belgium, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Kenya, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. CPM has been applied in a wide variety of contexts including health, education, family, business, social media, religion, security, and interpersonal relationships. Dr. Petronio is frequently invited to speak for organizations and conferences including: Security and Human Behavior, Washington, DC; Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, Google Headquarters in New York City; International Summit on the Future of Health Privacy, Washington, DC, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences-Grand Rounds, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Eli Lilly Human Resources Privacy Summit, Indianapolis; Congressional Briefing, Consortium of Social Science Associations, Washington, DC; and Academy of Prosthodontics, Austin, TX. Dr. Petronio has been an important voice in the Communication discipline, arguing for the importance of translational scholarship and modeling that work. In 2007, she spearheaded the Translating Research into Practice (TRIP) Center at IUPUI. Her work and career embody the value of generating knowledge and taking that knowledge where it can be applied to make lives better.
Although trained as a political scientist, Mary Stuckey fully embraces her “adopted” discipline of Communication, and is one of the field’s most highly regarded scholars of presidential rhetoric. She has published ten single-authored books, with the eleventh in press. Several of Dr. Stuckey’s books were published by major university presses in the area of rhetoric and public affairs. Her books range from a general account of how interpreting reality is a source of presidential power, to a longitudinal study of American identity as reflected in presidential discourse, to studies of the rhetoric of individual presidents, to analysis of specific presidential speeches. Perhaps Dr. Stuckey’s most substantial individual work is her book, Defining Americans: The Presidency and National Identity, which examines how presidents use rhetorics of inclusion and exclusion to establish what counts as essential to American identity. Among this book’s strengths are that it examines a wide range of presidents, both historical and contemporary, and that it considers a large enough sample of speeches to permit meaningful generalizations. The same qualities that characterize Dr. Stuckey’s single-authored books – thorough grounding in the primary sources, care in the selection and use of evidence, and clarity, strength, and insightfulness of argument – are also evident in her three edited books and her nearly 40 peer-reviewed articles. Additionally, she has a number of invited essays, briefing papers, and encyclopedia entries. Dr. Stuckey takes great care to instill standards of rigorous scholarship and vigorous argument in the students she mentors. Some indication of the high regard in which her scholarly judgment is held within the discipline is her selection first to edit the Southern Communication Journal and now the Quarterly Journal of Speech, NCA’s flagship journal in rhetorical studies. Her books have received awards from the Public Address and Political Communication Divisions of NCA.
Joseph B. Walther pioneered the field of the social dynamics of computer-mediated communication. Prior to his work, researchers in other disciplines focused on static channel effects on interpersonal and group processes. He articulated dynamic, communication-based explanations and predictions for how users develop impressions and interpersonal relations through extended message exchanges via the Internet. Dr. Walther’s work laid the foundation for the contemporary study of social media and social interaction online. With a more than 25-year distinguished career, he has become known as an important theorist, having articulated no fewer than four original theories. These include social information processing theory, the hyperpersonal model, warranting theory (with Parks), and the efficiency framework of mediated communication (with Watt & Nowak). The hallmark of Dr. Walther’s work throughout his career is the combination of novel theoretical ideas and innovative mainstream empirical research methods applied to the study of computer-mediated communication. The influence of his prodigious research is international. Within the Communication discipline, he was the first to receive NCA’s Woolbert Research Award on two separate occasions, each one marking an article published 10+ years prior that had stood the test of time and reconceptualized communication phenomena. In addition to receiving numerous awards from several NCA and ICA divisions, Dr. Walther was a Fulbright senior scholar in 2013, holds fellowships at universities in Germany and the Netherlands, and is the Wee Kim Wee Professor in Communication Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has provided keynote addresses in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Asia, and has developed innovative courses involving online collaborations among students from several countries. He in an ambassador of the field among countries and disciplines the world over. The corpus of Dr. Walther’s work has provided the intellectual space for an enormous variety of researchers to explore what social, technological, and behavioral factors influence the way we relate online, in a variety of settings, applications, and populations. It does so by exemplifying theoretically driven, imaginative, rigorous, solidly communication-focused research.