Larry Lambert, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication Arts
Larry Lambert is an Associate Professor of Communication Arts who earned his Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from Indiana University Bloomington, and has taught at IU South Bend since Fall, 2002. His teaching areas in Communication Arts include a variety of communication subjects associated with speech communication, in courses such as Rhetoric & Modern Discourse, Persuasion, Nonverbal Communication, and others. In his teaching, he focuses on engaging student knowledge and expectations, while helping them create their own knowledge about the discourses and varieties of communication that structure our society and constitute our identities, aspirations, relationships, and myriad other elements of our material, intellectual lives.
Professor Lambert's scholarship investigates nineteenth-century American rhetoric that focuses on the promotion and critique of technology in written, spoken, and visual media, and the impact of this discourse on the construction of American identity. The majority of his work centers on oratory and writings on that subject in the decades of the 1820s and 1830s, a period when America was still an intensely agricultural nation but quickly moving ideologically and materially into the machine age. His dissertation, titled Invoking the Machine: The Rhetorical Appeal to Machine Technology in American Whig Discourse, is an analysis of the discursive nature of this political and cultural movement and how it shaped the technological identity that is even today such a strong part of American identity. His most recent iteration of this research agenda has focused on how this technological identity was manifested and critiqued in technologically-oriented landscapes by American painters of the late nineteenth century, exemplified in the impressionist paintings of J. Alden Weir. An essay titled "Naturalizing Technology in Late Nineteenth Century America: An Aesthetic of Excess Meaning in the Paintings of J. Alden Weir" was published in the American Communication Journal (www.acjournal.org) in 2008. Other papers on the rhetoric of American technological and artistic identity have been recognized at conferences in the communication field including National Communication Association conventions, where in recent years one paper was presented with a Top Paper award and another presented on a Top Papers panel.
An active member of the National Communication Association, he serves this year (2009) as the immediate past Chair of the American Studies Division and was one of the program planners for the 2008 national convention. In addition, he has served on the association's Legislative Assembly multiple times in recent years as well as other committees.
At IU South Bend, he has served on a variety of committees both university-wide and in the School of the Arts. In addition, he is a life member of the IU Alumni Association and participates in a number of alumni events throughout the year. He will be on sabbatical during the spring 2010 semester.
