Visual Communication Division
Interest Group Awards
Listed here are awards given by the Interest Group to its members. Interests Groups are smaller communities within NCA's large membership that provide a range of resources including networking opportunities, Annual Convention programming, leadership opportunities, awards, and specialized information dissemination channels, among others.
Read more about this Interest Group.
Top Scholar Paper Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2020 | James Alexander McVey and Dustin A. Greenwalt, "Get Gritty With It: Memetic Icons and the Visual Ethos of Antifascism" |
| 2019 | Sara Erlichman, Penn State University, "BROTUS Memes: A Presidential Bromance" |
| 2019 | Sara Kitsch, Monmouth College, "The Contained Citizen: First Ladies, Public Memory, and the Rhetoric of Visual Containment" |
| 2018 | Roger Stahl, "Seeing through "American Sniper" |
| 2017 | Eli Mangold and Charles Goehring, "Toward a Theorization of the Rhetorical Possibilities of Aerial Images" |
| 2016 | Tracy Worrell and Kelly Norris Martin, "Investigating reliable measures of visual proficiency and basic design principles" |
| 2015 | Garnet C. Butchart, “Meditation on the Semiotic Phenomenology of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography” |
| 2015 | Stephanie H. Grey, “’Food Will Win the War’: Constitutive Affects of Abundance in WWI Food Propaganda” |
Top Student Paper Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Daniel James DeVinney, "The Changing Face of America: Post-Racial Visual Logics in the National Geographic" |
| 2020 | Kelly Williams, “'How Real, How Immediate, How Profoundly Truthful': Prosthetic Memory of World War I in They Shall Not Grow Old" |
| 2019 | Tyler Rife, "EnHance-ing" |
| 2019 | Margaret T. Hance Park, "(In)visibilizing Phoenix's Homeless Body" |
| 2018 | Benjamin Firgens, "The Circulation of Destruction from 1939 to 1941 and the Failure of the American Imagination Benjamin Firgens" |
| 2017 | Benjamin Firgens, "Mediting Nature: Aldo Leopold's Ethics of Astonishment" |
| 2016 | Norma Musih, "Bridging memories: Imagining citizenship in Israel/Palestine" |
| 2015 | Christopher Gilbert, “A Prolegomenon to a Twenty-First Century Anamorphic Rhetoric” |
| 2015 | Patricia England, “’You Saw Me before I was Born’: Feminists for Life’s college Outreach Program and Women’s (In)Visibility in the Pro-Life Movement” |
Outstanding Dissertation Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Julianna Kirschner, “(Un)Social Media: A Content Analysis of the Centralized Self on Twitter.” Ph.D. Diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2020. |
| 2019 | Janna Soeder, University of Maryland, Vanishing Images?: Mediations of Native Americans in the Tradition of the Western |
| 2016 | Sandra Ristovska, "Human Rights Through the Lens: A Study of the Institutionalization and Professionalization of Video Activism" |
| 2015 | Caitlin Bruce, “Transitional Art, Transnational Murmurs: Post-Revolutionary Urban Street Art” |
Outstanding Essay Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2019 | Casey Ryan Kelly, "Emasculating Trump: Incredulity, Homophobia, and the Spectacle of White Masculinity" |
| 2015 | Claire Cisco King, “’A Single Man and a Tragic Woman: Gender Politics and the Fag Hag’ in Feminist Media Studies” |
Outstanding Book Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2019 | Kevin Hamilton & Ned O'Gorman, Lookout America!: The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2019) |
| 2015 | Sharia Fahmy, Mary Angela Bock, and Wayne Wanta, Visual Communication Theory and Research: A Mass Communication Perspective (PALGRAVE MACMILLIAN, 2014) |
Diane Hope Book of the Year Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2021 | Kathleen M. Ryan, Pin Up! The Subculture (Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers; New edition, 2020). |
| 2020 | T. J. Thomson, To See and be Seen: The Environments, Interactions, and Identities Behind News Images. (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019). |
| 2018 | Leslie A. Hahner, To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century (Michigan State University Press, 2017) |
| 2017 | Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (University of Chicago Press, 2016) |
| 2016 | Casey Ryan Kelly, Abstinence Cinema: Virginity and the Rhetoric of Sexual Purity in Contemporary Film (Rutgers University Press, 2016) |
Janis Edwards Article of the Year Award
| Year | Award Winner |
|---|---|
| 2021 | Susan Keith & Leslie-Jean Thornton "Night and Day: A Visual Diptych of Hate and Horror in Charlottesville" |
| 2020 | Caitlin Frances Bruce, “River of Words as Space for Encounter: Contested Meaning in Rhetorical Convergence Zones,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 105, no. 4 (2019): 441-464. |
| 2018 | Elinor Light, "Aesthetic Ruptures: Viewing Graffitti as the Emplaed Verncaular" Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 15:2, 179-195. |
| 2017 | Damien Smith Pfister and Carly S. Woods, "The Unnaturalistic Enthymeme: Figuration, Interpretation, and Critique after Digital Mediation" Argumentation and Advocacy, 52:4, 236-253 |
| 2016 | Elizabeth Kaszynski |