» The Department of Communication welcomes two new colleagues for Fall 2012, Dr. Chaim Noy and Dr. Aisha Durham.

Dr. Chaim Noy will be joining us as an associate professor. He is the author of Narrative Community: Voices of Israeli Backpackers (Wayne State University Press) and coeditor of Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to a Rite of Passage (State University of New York Press). His recent articles include an “in press” piece at Semiotica and 2011 articles in Qualitative Inquiry and Social Semiotics. He comes to us from a position as senior lecturer in the School of Communication at Sapir College (Israel), and he spent the Fall 2011 semester at University of Pennsylvania on the Ruth Meltzer Distinguished Fellowship.

Dr. Aisha Durham comes to us from Texas A && M University where she has been an assistant professor with joint appointments in Communication and Africana Studies. Her forthcoming book, At Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture (Peter Lang) extends her earlier discussions of hip hop culture, media representations, and the body in her co-edited volumes, Home Girls Make Some!: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology and Globalizing Cultural Studies: Ethnographic Interventions in Theory, Method & Policy. Her most recent article appeared in the February 2012 issue of Feminist Media Studies.

» Abe Khan’s first book, Curt Flood in the Media: Baseball, Race, and the Demise of the Activist Athlete, has been released by the University Press of Mississippi. It is the second book in a series titled "Race, Rhetoric, and the Media," edited by Davis W. Houck at Florida State University. As the publisher describes it, “Khan examines the ways in which the media constructed the case and Flood's persona. By examining the mainstream press, the black press, and primary sources including Flood's autobiography, Khan exposes the complexities of what it means to be a prominent black American athlete--in 1969 and today.”

» Rachel Dubrofsky's first book, The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television: Watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, has been released by Rowman & Littlefield. The book is part of Rowman & Littlefield's Critical Studies in Television series, edited by Mark Andrejevic.

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2012 Grazier Lecture: François Cooren.
François Cooren, professor of communication and chair of the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal delivered the 2012 endowed Grazier Lecture during the annual Communication Day celebration on April 20, 2012. His title was “Why Matter Always Matters in Organizational Communication: Animation, Incarnation, and Ventriloquism.” Dr. Cooren is the immediate past president of the International Communication Association, former editor-in-chief of Communication Theory, and previously secretary and now president of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis. His many publications include two books, The Organizing Property of Communication (2000) and Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism (2010), both published by John Benjamins. Click here for additional information about Professor Cooren, or here for a recent interview with him.