National Communications Association honors Colorado State University professors

One former and three current Colorado State University professors in the Department of Communication Studies will receive awards from the National Communication Association at its annual convention in November.

Professors Greg Dickinson and Eric Aoki, along with former faculty member and professor Brian Ott, will receive the NCA Golden Anniversary Monograph Award for their article “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum,” which was the lead story in Communication Critical/Cultural Studies, 8.

Associate professor Tom Dunn will receive the Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation "Queerly Remembered: Tactical and Strategic Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past." Dr. Dunn received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011.

They four professors will be honored during the NCA’s 98th annual convention Nov. 15-18, in Orlando, Fla.

About Greg Dickinson: Dickinson is interim associate dean for undergraduate studies. He is an award-winning teacher and scholar. He has received the College of Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Award and the CSU Alumni Best Teacher Award. He has also received the National Communication Association’s Gerald R. Miller Dissertation Award and (with his co-authors Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki) the NCA Golden Anniversary Monograph Award.

About Eric Aoki: Aoki is an award-winning teacher-scholar of interpersonal, co-cultural and intercultural communication. He was awarded the College of Liberal Arts Excellence in Teaching Award (at the rank of associate professor and assistant professor) in fall 2011 and fall 2001. He also was awarded the 2009 Multi-Ethnic Faculty Distinguished Service Award. He recently returned from a research symposium in January 2012 in Kigali, Rwanda, where he co-presented at the SIT international symposium on “Conflict, Memory, and Reconciliation.”

About Thomas Dunn: Dunn is an assistant professor of Rhetorical Studies and the director of the Basic Public Speaking Course at CSU. He teaches classes in rhetoric, public address and civic engagement, and co-teaches graduate coursework in communication pedagogy. He earned both his Ph.D. in Communication and a Certificate in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Pittsburgh.

About the National Communication Association: The NCA advances communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific and aesthetic inquiry. The NCA serves the scholars, teachers and practitioners who are its members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching. Dedicated to fostering and promoting free and ethical communication, the NCA promotes the widespread appreciation of the importance of communication in public and private life, the application of competent communication to improve the quality of human life and relationships, and the use of knowledge about communication to solve human problems.
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