Departmental News
Welcome New Faculty Members
The Fall 2008 semester will signal the addition of two new assistant professors to the Department of Communication at UM—Xiaoli Nan and Nneka Ifeoma Ofulue.
Xiaoli Nan comes to UM from the University of Wisconsin where she was an assistant professor in the Department of Life Sciences Communication. Her
research centers on the psychological effects of strategic communications including advertising and health communication. At Wisconsin, Dr. Nan taught public communication campaigns at the undergraduate level and graduate seminars on advertising and persuasion. Dr. Nan has a B.A. from Beijing University in China, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota. She has published widely, including articles in the Journal of Advertising, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Psychology and Marketing.
Nneka Ifeoma Ofulue has taught at UM as a visiting assistant professor for the last two years and will now be a tenure-track assistant professor. Dr. Ofulue specializes in feminist and rhetorical criticism, religious communication, and 19th century women’s public address, and teaches courses in rhetorical criticism, American women’s public address, communication and religion, and Black rhetoric. Her research interests like in the intersection of gender, religion, and culture in public discourses. She is interested in understanding religion in the contested space of the public sphere and its implication for social justice. Her current project examines the resurgence of traditional gender archetypes in contemporary American evangelical rhetoric of “biblical manhood and womanhood,” with special focus on the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class in American evangelical culture. Dr. Ofulue has her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia and has published in the Journal of Communication and Religion and in the book The Political Pulpit Revisited.
