Category: students

We are happy to announce Rhetoric, Theory and Culture PhD student Wenjing Liu is among the winners for the Doctoral Finishing Fellowship Award. Congratulations!

Finishing Fellowships provide support to PhD candidates who are close to completing their degrees. These fellowships are available through the generosity of alumni and friends of the University. They are intended to recognize outstanding PhD candidates who are in need of financial support to finish their degrees and are also contributing to the attainment of goals outlined in The Michigan Tech Plan.

Three RTC Graduate students presented papers at the 24th International Conference of the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies, July 5-8, 2018. Hua Wang (with Junhua Wang, University of Minnesota Duluth) presented on the topic “Culture and Rhetoric: A Contrastive Analysis on the Effectiveness of Two Articles on Climate Change”. Aranya Srijongjai presentated on “Digital Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism: A Methodological Framework” and also chaired the Communication and Technology panel of the conference. Wenjing Liu presented on “Color in China”.

The conference was on the theme “Communication and Dialogue: Integrating Global Communities”. According to organizers, “The IAICS international conference brings scholars together from around the world to share ideas, experiences and scholarly research from diverse interdisciplinary perspectives on communication across cultures.” The conference was hosted by DePaul University in Chicago, IL.

RTC PhD candidate, Tolu Odebunmi recently received a IGALA 10 USA-based Scholar Travel Grant of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in June 2018 with academic support from Dr. Victoria Bergvall. The grant was to assist her to present at the International Gender and Language (IGALA) conference at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana. The conference theme was “Gender, Language and Sexuality in Multicultural Contexts.” Odebunmi’s paper was titled “A Critical Discourse Study of ‘Sex trash talk’ in Liberian protests.” The grant was administered through the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH, USA), and was aimed at graduate students whose abstracts have been accepted by the IGALA conference scientific committee.

RTC Master student, Nancy Achiaa Frimpong presented a paper on August 11, 2018 at the Comics Studies Society conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference theme was “Mind the Gaps! The Futures of the Field”. Frimpong presented on the topic “Ebola Virus Disease as Colored: The Case of American Online News Dissemination of Comics.” Her presentation received financial support from the Graduate Students Government Travel Grant, and the Humanities Department Travel Grant; and academic mentorship from communication and culture professor, Dr. Sue Collins.

Silke Feltz, a PhD candidate in Humanities, has published a book review of “The Oxford Handbook of Food Ethics,” by Anne Barnhill, Mark Budolfson and Tyler Doggett (Editors) in Metapsychology Online Reviews.