Why Marquette?
I appreciate the openness to new ideas that Marquette students display. When challenged to think out of the box, most students respond to the call. I really believe that students at Marquette value learning and that they are vitally interested in the important social dialogues occurring in contemporary society. I see my role as one of facilitating those interests further and guiding students to probe their world in a more critical and analytic fashion.

Research Interests
Political Communication
Communication & the Presidency
Cultural Values and Ethics

Professional Affiliations
National Communication Association
Central States Communication Association

Recent Books
Truman’s Whistle-stop Campaign (College Station: Library of Presidential Rhetoric. Texas A & M University Press, 2008).

New Approaches to Rhetoric (co-edited with Patricia A. Sullivan). Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 2004.

‘In a Perilous Hour‘: The Public Address of John F. Kennedy (with George N. Dionisopoulos). Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Recent Articles
“Demagoguery, Democratic Dissent, and ‘Re-visioning’ Democracy,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9 (2006): 471-478.

“History, Collective Memory, and the Appropriation of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Reagan’s Rhetorical Legacy” (with Denise M. Bostdorff, College of Wooster), Presidential Studies Quarterly, 35, (2005): 661-690.

Recent Book Chapters
"Report of the National Task Force on the Ethical Responsibilities of Presidential Rhetoric." In The Prospect of Presidential Rhetoric, ed. James Arnt Aune and Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2008), pp. 317-339.

“Inaugurating the Second Reconstruction: President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights” in James Arnt Aune & Enrique D. Rigsby (Eds.) Civil Rights and the American Presidency (pp. 83-113). College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2005.

“John F. Kennedy” (rev. for Theodore O. Windt) in Bernard K. Duffy and Richard W. Leeman (Eds.) American Voices: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Orators (pp. 231-237). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

“Robert F. Kennedy” (with Patricia A. Sullivan, SUNY--New Paltz) in Bernard K. Duffy and Richard W. Leeman (Eds.) American Voices: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Orators (pp. 238-247). Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

“Ralph W. Nader” (with Patricia A. Sullivan, SUNY--New Paltz) in Bernard K. Duffy and Richard W. Leeman (Eds.) American Voices: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Orators (pp. 330-338). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.

“Official and Unofficial Civil Religious Discourse,” rpt. in Roderick Hart and John L. Pauley II, The Political Pulpit Revisited (pp. 161-168). West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2005.