Kirt
H. Wilson is a rhetorical critic and theorist whose research moves from African
American public discourse to presidential rhetoric and from nineteenth-century rhetorical
practice to theories of social change and race.
Professor Wilson graduated from Purdue University with an MA in 1991 and
from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL with a Ph.D. in 1995.
Prior
to coming to Penn State, Dr. Wilson served as Assistant and Associate Professors
of rhetoric and communication at the University of Minnesota (1996-2010). There
he taught courses in African American civil rights discourse, argument theory
and practice, close textual criticism, collective memory, sentimental
aesthetics, and US public address. He served as the Director of Graduate
Studies for the Communication Studies Department at Minnesota and as a faculty
advisor on numerous collegiate and university committees. From 2008-2009 he was
a CIC Academic Leadership Fellow.
In
addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he is the author of The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate: The
Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place (Michigan State Press ,
2002) and an Associate Editor for The Sage
Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (2009). In 2004, the University of Minnesota
honored professor Wilson with a McKnight
Presidential Fellowship, an honor extended to only a handful of tenured
associate faculty each year. Professor Wilson has won the National
Communication Association's New
Investigator Award (2001), the Karl
R. Wallace Memorial Award (2002), and two book awards--NCA's Winans-Wichelns Memorial Award and the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for Published
Research.
Professor
Wilson is currently writing two book-length manuscripts. In the first he
considers the theory and practices of mimesis
(imitation) in the nineteenth-century United States. In the second he is
uncovering the sentimental aesthetics that construct our collective memories of
the civil rights movement. In 2010 he published a book chapter titled, "The
Racial Contexts of Public Address: Reconstruction Violence as Text and
Context," in the Handbook of Public
Address and "Debating the Great Emancipator," in the journal Rhetorical & Public Affairs.
CAS department member, Magi Colby, died on August 11th. As the project coordinator for the Drug Resistance Strategies Project Magi was responsible for developing a new rural version of the keepin' it REAL curriculum and supervising its implementation in 39 rural schools in Pennsylvania and Ohio. She also was responsible for adapting keepin' it REAL for use by the D.A.R.E. program in the US as well as 23 countries around the world. Under her management, keepin' it REAL has become the most widely disseminated prevention program in the world. We are grateful for her time as our colleague and friend. Magi truly enriched all she touched. She will be missed but always be part of our team.
