Faculty Summer Travels

Published Fall 2023

Stacey Sowards, Professor, Communication Studies  

This summer I went to Tubingen, Germany for the Rhetoric Society of Europe conference, as well as to Innsbruck and Rome. As part of my editorship for the Quarterly Journal of Speech, I wanted to reach out to scholars in Europe to expand the global outreach of the journal. I also recently visited Mexico City for the Feria Internacional de Libro Universitarias y Universitarios. I think the most important aspect related to teaching is understanding how scholars teach from different perspectives. Many of our international colleagues think about rhetoric, rhetorical theory, argumentation, and rhetorical method in very different ways than scholars do in the US. Such experiences also remind us that we all have different perspectives and life experiences that shape how we interact with the world, and that's a really important life lesson to share with students.

Benjamin Bays, Associate Professor of Instruction, Radio Television Film

If there is a collection of comics in Western Europe, I went there this summer. I traveled around Europe and found the epicenters of comics in the UK, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. I talked to all the artists, writers, publishers, journalists, and critics in these spaces and can now bring something special back to my classroom! Doing so adds so much depth to the student experience because we can now have conversations connecting all of mass media – and thus everything in Moody – to the legacy of print, as well as explore all the different histories of print, each with their own regional flavors.