Angela G. Ray

Angela G. Ray is Associate Professor in the Communication Studies Department and the Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the School of Communication. She held a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence from 2010 to 2013, and from 2017 to 2020 she was Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in The Graduate School and chair of the Editorial Board of Northwestern University Press. Her scholarship and teaching emphasize rhetorical analysis and rhetorical history, with specialties in nineteenth-century U.S. popular education and social reform. Her book The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States analyzes a nineteenth-century public media network, and it won awards from the American Forensic Association, the National Communication Association, and the Rhetoric Society of America. She is coeditor of Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century, which brings together original scholarship from communication, English, history, and musicology. She is presently writing a book about a debating society organized by young free Black men in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, and evidence of its impact during Reconstruction and afterward. Her scholarship also appears as chapters in books published by various university and commercial publishers and in journals such as Argumentation and Advocacy, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Women’s Studies in Communication.

Education

• PhD, Speech-Communication, University of Minnesota
• MA, Drama and Theatre Studies, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London
• BA, English & Chemistry, Transylvania University

Recent Publications

• Ray, Angela G. "Caricatures versus Character Studies: Helen Potter's Mimetic Advocacy for US Woman's Rights." In Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics, edited by Patricia Bizzell and Lisa Zimmerelli, 179–91. New York: Modern Language Association, 2021.
• Ray, Angela G., and Robert Elliot Mills. "Reading Freaks: Trump in an Analogical Hermeneutic Network." In Networking Argument, edited by Carol Winkler, 149–54. New York: Routledge, 2020.
• Ray, Angela G., and Paul Stob, eds. Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.
• Ray, Angela G. "The Agency of the Archive and the Challenges of Classification." In Recovering Argument, edited by Randall A. Lake, 63–68. New York: Routledge, 2018.
• Ray, Angela G. "Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States." Chapter 45 in The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, edited by Michael MacDonald, 571–81. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Ray, Angela G. "Warriors and Statesmen: Debate Education among Free African American Men in Antebellum Charleston." Chapter 1 in Speech and Debate as Civic Education, edited by J. Michael Hogan, Jessica A. Kurr, Michael J. Bergmaier, and Jeremy D. Johnson, 25–35. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017.
• Ray, Angela G. "Rhetoric and the Archive." Review of Communication, Special Issue, "Rhetorical Criticism's Multitudes," ed. Charles E. Morris III and Jeffrey Bennett, 16, no. 1 (2016): 43–59.

Recent Achievements

• 2020-2021 Van Zelst Research Professor in Communication, Northwestern University
• 2017-2020 Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, The Graduate School, Northwestern University
• 2017-2020 Chair, Editorial Board, Northwestern University Press
• 2016 Faculty Mentorship Award, Rhetorical and Communication Theory Division, National Communication Association
• For her book, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States: Book Award, Rhetoric Society of America
• James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, National Communication Association
• Diamond Anniversary Book Award, National Communication Association
• Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award, Public Address Division, National Communication Association
• Daniel Rohrer Memorial Outstanding Research Award, American Forensic Association

Courses

• COMM ST 215, Principles of Rhetorical Criticism
• COMM ST 314, Rhetoric and Public Commemoration
• COMM ST 324-1, Rhetoric of U.S. Women’s Rights, Colonial Era to 1920
• COMM ST 416, Contemporary Rhetorical Analysis
• COMM ST 525, Problems in Communication Studies: Oratory and Performance