Larry Lambert, Ph.D.

Larry Lambert is Associate Professor of Communication Arts at Indiana University South Bend. In his teaching, Lambert 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. His scholarship investigates nineteenth-century American rhetoric that promoted and critiqued technology, and the impact of this discourse on the construction of American identity. 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 such a strong part of American identity. An essay titled "Naturalizing Technology in Late Nineteenth Century America: An Aesthetic of Excess Meaning in the Paintings of J. Alden Weir," published in the American Communication Journal (http://www.ac-journal.org/?page_id=162), focuses on how this technological identity was manifested and critiqued in technologically-oriented landscapes by American painters of the late nineteenth century. Other papers on the rhetoric of American technological and artistic identity have been recognized at 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.