Roger Aden, Ph.D.

Charles E. Zumkehr Professor of Speech Communication
Specialization: Rhetoric, Place, and Space; Public Memory
Schoonover Center 429
740-593-4822
aden@ohio.edu

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Bio

I explore the meanings of places, both physical and imagined, as they are rhetorically constructed and interpreted by those who experience them. As a result, I employ both rhetorical and qualitative methods of inquiry. In Popular Stories and Promised Lands, I examined how narratives found in film, television, comic strips, and magazines construct imagined places in which fan communities gathered. In Huskerville, I illustrated how geography, history, and college football converge in fans’ cultural enactment of being a Nebraskan. In Upon the Ruins of Liberty, I outlined how competing memories intersected within the advocacy, design, excavation, and building of the President’s House public memory installation in Independence National Historical Park. I am continuing to explore the relationships among memories and places in three forthcoming books: Childhood Memory Spaces (Peter Lang); and a pair of edited volumes, U.S. Public Memory, Rhetoric, Nationhood, and the National Mall (Lexington) and Haunting Public Memories, Rhetoric, and the U.S. National Mall (Lexington).