Charles E. Morris III, professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and affiliated professor of LGBT studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, will be honored with two prestigious scholar awards from the National Communication Association (NCA) at its annual conference in November.
Charles E. Morris III, professor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and affiliated professor of LGBT studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, will be honored with two prestigious scholar awards from the National Communication Association at its annual conference in November.
Morris was named a recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award, which recognizes and rewards NCA members for a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication. He will also receive the NCA’s Golden Anniversary Monograph Award for article of the year for “Decentering Whiteness in AIDS Memory: Indigent Rhetorical Criticism and the Dead of Hart Island,” which he co-authored with the late Daniel C. Brouwer of Arizona State University. The article was published in the flagship Quarterly Journal of Speech 107 (May 2021).
The NCA previously recognized Morris with Golden Anniversary Monograph Awards in 2003 and 2010. His other NCA awards include the Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award in 2021 and two divisional Distinguished Scholar Awards, one in 2020 from the organization’s Critical and Cultural Studies Division and one in 2017 from the Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division.
Morris is co-founding editor of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. As one of the early scholars of queer studies in rhetoric, he has shaped the field with extraordinary boldness and engagement. His body of research in historic public address has transformed the field, both through the recovery of otherwise neglected GLBTQ rhetoric and through working to queer our understanding of rhetorical theory and criticism.
The NCA advances communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific and aesthetic inquiry. NCA serves the scholars, teachers and practitioners who are its members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching.
