Distinguished scholar Jeffrey A. Bennett will present the Brigance Forum lecture at Wabash College’s Korb Classroom in the Fine Arts Center at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 21. The title of his talk is “‘Equal Dignity’ Under the Law: Affective Rhetorics and Civic Belonging in the Obergefell v. Hodges Decision.”
Bennett is an associate professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University who specializes in issues of sexuality, health, and medicine. His forthcoming book, Managing Diabetes: The Cultural Politics of Disease, will be released in June through New York University Press. Managing Diabetes explores how the disease is “imagined in popular culture” and, in so doing, “Bennett argues that popular anecdotes, media representation, and communal myths are as meaningful as medical and scientific understandings of the disease” (NYU Press).
He is also the author of Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance and is also published widely in academic journals, including Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Journal of Medical Humanities, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and The Journal of Homosexuality.
Bennett has been the recipient of several prestigious honors. He received the Randy Majors Award from the National Communication Association’s Caucus on LGBTQ Concerns in 2017, which recognizes an individual’s outstanding contributions to LGBT scholarship in communication studies. He also received the 2010 New Investigator Award from the National Communication Association’s Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division, as well as the National Communication Association’s 2009 Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award, which recognizes an early career scholar whose research shows great excellence and promise.
The Brigance Forum is an annual public lecture in memory of the late William Norwood Brigance, teacher, scholar and leader in the Speech Association of America. In his 38 years at Wabash College, Brigance taught generations of Wabash students how to be more effective when they spoke and, through his textbooks, taught thousands more in American high schools and colleges.
Bennett’s lecture is free and open to the public and will include a Q&A session. A reception will follow in Littell Lobby.