Departmental News
Students Selected to Attend Doctoral Honors Seminar
Two Department of Communication Ph.D. students have been selected to attend the 2008 Doctoral Honors Seminar, sponsored by the National Communication Association and hosted by the University of Alabama. This highly competitive program brings doctoral students together for an intensive week-long seminar where they discuss their work and receive feedback from leading experts in the discipline. The seminar involves students in three specific areas—Media Studies, Communication Studies, and Rhetorical Studies.
The two UM students selected for the Doctoral Honors Seminar are Bjørn Stillion Southard and Stephen Underhill. Approximately sixty students applied for only twenty-seven slots. Both Stillion Southard and Underhill will participate in the Rhetorical Studies seminar along with students from Indiana University, the University of Georgia, the University of Washington, and elsewhere. The faculty mentors in Rhetorical Studies are Charles Morris from Boston College, Mary Stuckey from Georgia State University, and Eric King Watts from the University of North Carolina and the focus of the seminar in Rhetoric and Social Change.
Bjørn Stillion Southard is a Ph.D. candidate studying the rhetorical origins of the 18th and 19th century American Colonization Society. Stillion Southard has presented his research at numerous national conferences, including ECA and NCA. He has published articles in proceedings from the annual NCA/AFA conference on argumentation and in Voices of Democracy. Stillion Southard was also named a laureate in the James L. Golden Prize in Rhetoric competition in 2003 and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards.
Stephen Underhill is a Ph.D. student whose dissertation examines J. Edgar Hoover and the rhetorical rise of the FBI. Specifically, Underhill is attending to public campaigns carried out by Hoover and the FBI against crime, free speech, and communism. Underhill has presented research at NCA and Northwest Communication Association conventions and has published in the Voices of Democracy and the Journal of Communication & Religion. In addition to teaching classes in the department, Underhill is also an Archives Technician at the National Archives II in College Park.
