The University of Illinois Library celebrates the tenure and promotion of faculty by giving them the opportunity to select a book to be added to the Library collection in their honor. As the Library states, each book is book-plated and "stand as a reminder now and into the future of the remarkable accomplishments of the faculty at this university."
See below for a sample of some of the books Communication faculty have selected since the Library program began in 2000. And next time you're in the library, check out one of these titles!
Josue Cisneros
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria E. Anzaldua
This is a brilliant and heart-wrenching work of autobiography, literature, poetry, and scholarship. It offers a defining take on borders of all kinds – geographic, linguistic, identitary. Reading this book was a transformative experience, and I am still trying to come to grips with all of the insights it offers for my life and work. – Professor Cisneros
Cara Finnegan
Norms of Rhetorical Culture by Thomas B. Farrell
Thomas Farrell was my dissertation advisor. He died ten years ago, much too young. Only since Tom’s death have I realized the full extent of my intellectual debt to him. Norms of Rhetorical Culture typifies Tom’s rich, wide-ranging scholarship about rhetoric, which he marvelously defined as “the fine and useful art of making things matter.
- Professor Finnegan
Leanne Knobloch
The SAGE Handbook of Family Communication by L.H. Turner & R. West
The study of family communication has grown by leaps and bounds since I was an undergraduate student, and this edited collection showcases the very best the field has to offer at the moment. Who knows what lies ahead?
- Professor Knobloch
Michele Koven
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life by Emile Durkheim
I read this book as a college freshman in my social science core course in 1984. This was my first exposure to the systematic study of cultural phenomena. Soon after, I switched my major to anthropology. This book was an exhilarating initiation to questions that continue to interest me today.
- Professor Koven
Travis Dixon
The Black Image in the White Mind: Media and Race in America by Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki
Robert Entman’s work, as encapsulated in this manuscript, motivated much of my own scholarship. When I was considering the role of racial stereotyping in the mass media, particularly news contexts, it was Entman’s work that told me that the area was important and deserved serious social scientific attention.
- Professor Dixon
Brian Quick
A Theory of Psychological Reactance by Jack W. Brehm
This book is especially meaningful to me because Brehm provides a framework for why individuals often resist persuasive messages. His theory has resulted in an extensive line of research for myself as well as many others across a range of disciplines. Psychological reactance theory offers researchers and practitioners alike with a practical framework to use when designing persuasive messages.
- Professor Quick
John Caughlin
Communicating Social Support by Daena Goldsmith
I learned more about communication from this book than any others I have read in a long time.
- Professor Caughlin
Ned O'Gorman
Theology and Social Theory by John Milbank
I had read theology (a good deal); I had read social theory (quite a bit); I had never, ever thought to think of them as inhabiting the same intellectual and indeed historical space. But Milbank makes it utterly evident that they must be read together.
Reading for me is a means of wrestling with angels. Here I was overcome. Few books overcome me.
- Professor O'Gorman
Read more about faculty bookplates at https://www.library.illinois.edu/collections/special-collections/bookplates/