News Flash -- On April 11, 2003, the Board of Regents at the University of Minnesota voted to promote me from an Assistant "Probationary" member of the faculty to an Associate Professor with "indefinite tenure" effective this fall. In some respects, this promotion alters my life very little--I'll continue to serve in the Communication Studies Department on the Minneapolis campus, and I'll still teach and research in the areas that I explored just last year. In another respect, however, the new status provides a sense of personal and professional legitimacy that I struggle to express or even understand. Still, there it is. 

I completed my Ph.D. at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (1995) and an M.A. at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN (1991).  My scholarship transverses several areas, however my primary interests involve rhetorical theory and criticism, nineteenth-century political discourse, and African American civil rights rhetoric.

Currently, I teach undergraduate courses in argument theory and civil rights rhetoric. At the graduate level, I facilitate US Public Discourse, Textual Analysis and Criticism, and Rhetoric, Race, and Culture. I've published essays on the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the civil rights advocacy of Senator Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln's rhetorical leadership, and racial politics in the Post-Reconstruction era.

On January 15, 2003, I shared some of my research on W. E. B. Du Bois with a national radio audience. Gretchen Helfrich of Odyssey (WBEZ Chicago) led a broadcast discussion on The Souls of Black Folk with historian David Blight, philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams, and myself. If the RealOne Player is installed on your computer, you can listen to an archive of the show.

In 2002 Michigan State University Press published my first book titled: Reconstruction's Desegregation Debate: The Politics of Equality and the Rhetoric of Place.

I've been fortunate to receive the prestigious Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award from the National Communication Association (2002) and the New Investigator Award from the Rhetoric and Communication Theory Division of the National Communication Association (2001). In 2002 I was one of two recipients of the Arthur "Red" Motley Exemplary Teaching Award, the highest teaching award given by the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. 

Read more about my professional life in this profile published by the U of M's  College of Liberal Arts. Additional information about my research is located on my research page and my curriculum vitae (PDF format).  If you are curious about my courses, brief descriptions and links to syllabi are available.  You can reach me directly via email or through the snail mail address below.  In addition, my office hours and directions to the Communication Studies department are listed here . 

Email address:
wilso092@tc.umn.edu (My Office Hours )

Snail Mail:
Kirt H. Wilson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor 
Speech-Communication Department 
225 Ford Hall 
224 Church St. SE 
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Office Phone: 612.624.5235 
Fax: 612.624.6544 (Please do NOT use this number to fax papers).