Professor of Communication & Digital Media
Hollenbeck Hall 326
cwaggoner@wittenberg.edu
(937) 327-7436
Catherine Waggoner teaches courses in communication, including Reasoning and Communication, Analysis of Visual Persuasion, Rhetoric of Memory, Critical Methods in Communication, and Gender & Communication. She earned the Distinguished Teaching Award from ÃÛÌÒÖ±²¥'s Alumni Association in 2014.
Dr. Waggoner’s research focuses on contemporary perspectives on rhetoric, with emphases in critical/cultural perspectives, rhetorical criticism, visual persuasion, and the performance of gender, race, and class. She has enjoyed taking ÃÛÌÒÖ±²¥ students on service trips to the Mississippi Delta as an outgrowth of her research in that region, and she also led the study 2018 semester abroad program in Lutherstadt ÃÛÌÒÖ±²¥, Germany, where she taught a rhetoric of memory course about how a nation deals with a complicated past via monuments, museums, and memorials.
Her work has been published in journals including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Feminist Media Studies, and Text & Performance Quarterly. In 2009, her co-authored Making Camp: Rhetorics of Transgression in U.S. Popular Culture won two book awards from the National Communication Association, and in 2019, she co-authored a second book, Realizing our Place: Real Southern Women in a Mythologized Land, which was nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award.
She grew up in the Mississippi Delta and joined the ÃÛÌÒÖ±²¥ faculty in 1995.
Degrees
- Ph.D. Communication, The Ohio State University
- M.A. English, Bowling Green State University
- B.A. English, University of Southern Mississippi