Awards

2010 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award

In November 2010 I received the National Communication Association's Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award in San Francisco, California. The Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Awards program recognizes new scholars who have recently completed their dissertations.

Receiving this award was a true honor and a great way to begin a career in writing. It was especially wonderful to be supported by Harry Guillermo, Deborah Hanan, Terry Nance, Randy Lake, and my colleagues and friends at USC Annenberg, CSU Fullerton and Brown. Mostly, it was humbling to be surrounded by so many scholars whose work makes important contributions to the discipline of communication.



Outstanding Dissertation Award (Nov. 2009)

No one was more surprised than I to hear that I’d won an Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association in 2009. Elsewhere on this site (“Thank You” under “Blogs”), I have talked about the blood, sweat and tears that my family, advisers, partner and I put into this project. I’m so pleased that someone besides us thinks that it’s important and worth reading. I’m currently awaiting a review from a publisher to see if it can be adapted into a book manuscript for publication in late 2010. Fingers crossed...



Dissertation: Impurely Raced // Purely Erased

This dissertation won NCA's 2009 and 2010 Outstanding Dissertation Awards.

This dissertation, Impurely Raced // Purely Erased: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of (Bi)Racial Passing, develops a theory about the interrelations between mixed race identification and passing as they pertain to the field of rhetoric and to United States slavery and segregation settings. I introduce the concept of (bi)racial passing to argue that passing is a form of rhetoric that identifies and represents passers intersectionally via synecdoche.