Associate Professor聽Phaedra C. Pezzullo聽joins CU-麻豆影院 from the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the mobilization of resistance to toxic pollution, the communication of resilience in what she calls 鈥渢he late age of fossil fuels,鈥� and the advocacy of environmental and social justice. With interdisciplinary training in the humanities and the sciences, she engages ethnographic participant observation fieldwork, qualitative interviews, popular texts across media, news archives, government documents and contemporary critical theoretical perspectives.
An award-winning teacher at the undergraduate and graduate levels, Pezzullo holds both a master鈥檚 and a doctorate in communication studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned two bachelor鈥檚 degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst鈥攁 Bachelor of Science in Natural Resource Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Thought and Political Economy.
Pezzullo has authored numerous publications, including聽Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice聽(University of Alabama Press, 2007), which was awarded the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award as well as the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric/Public Address, the Christine L. Oravec Research Award in Environmental Communication, and the Book of the Year Award for the Critical and Cultural Studies Division of the National Communication Association. She also co-edited聽Environmental Justice and Environmentalism聽(MIT Press, 2007) and聽Readings on Rhetoric and Performance聽(Strata, 2010), edited聽Cultural Studies and the Environment, Revisited聽(Routledge, 2010) and co-authored聽Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, 4th Ed. (Sage, 2015).
She has published widely and currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals聽Cultural Studies,听Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies,听Environmental Communication聽and the聽Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Starting July 2016, Pezzullo is the Director of聽,听reflecting her longstanding commitment to praxis on and off campus. She has served on and consulted with the International Environmental Communication Association鈥檚 Climate Negotiations Working Group at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)/COP21), the American Bar Association鈥檚 Environment, Energy and Resources committee, the Sierra Club鈥檚 national Environmental Justice committee and the City of 麻豆影院鈥檚 Planning Department.