E-Mail Address: wendy.leeds-hurwitz@uwp.edu

NOTE: Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz retired from UWP in June 2010. Current students should direct questions to the department: (262) 595-2331. Alumni are welcome to send emails if they want to stay in touch, but should contact the current PCAA advisor for activities and other information.

Biography: Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz earned her B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She joined UW-Parkside as an Assistant Professor in 1982, becoming Associate Professor in 1988, Professor in 1995, and Professor Emerita in 2010. She won the Stella C. Gray Excellence in Teaching Award in 1995, the Club Advisor of the Year award in 2002, and the Excellence in Research and Creative Activity award in 2003. She is past advisor of both the UWP chapter of Lambda Pi Eta, the national communication honor society, and the Parkside Communication Alumni Association. She was a UW-System Teaching Fellow in 1986-87, a fellow at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies (UW-Milwaukee) in 1990-91, and a Fellow at the Collegium de Lyon, an Institute for Advanced Studies in France, in 2009. She served as Chair of the Language and Social Interaction Division (1995-97) and the Nominating Committee (1999-2000) of the International Communication Association, and also of the Semiotics and Communication Division (2003-04) and the International and Intercultural Communication Division (2008-09) of the National Communication Association. She chaired the organizing committee for the NCA Summer Conference on Intercultural Dialogue, held July 22-26, 2009 in Istanbul, Turkey. In November 2009 the National Communication Association gave her the Robert J. Kibler Memorial Award for “dedication to excellence and commitment to the profession." She will be Chercheur invitée [Invited Scholar], Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France in Fall 2010. She was named Director of the Center for Intercultural Dialogue, under the auspices of the Council for Communication Associations in 2010.

Teaching and Research Specializations: Language and social interaction, ethnography of communication, intercultural communication, semiotics, communication theory, childhood socialization, history of the disicpline, interdisciplinarity.

Major Publications

Communication in Everyday Life:
A Social Interpretation
(1989, Ablex)

Rolling in Ditches with Shamans:
Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization
of American Anthropology (2004, University of Nebraska)

Semiotics and Communication:
Signs, Codes, Cultures
(1993, Lawrence Erlbaum)

From Generation to Generation:
Maintaining Cultural Identity over Time
(2005, Hampton Press)

Social Approaches to Communication
(1995, Guilford)

Socially Constructing Communication
(2009, Hampton Press)

Wedding as Text:
Communicating Cultural Identities through Ritual
(2002, Lawrence Erlbaum)

The Social History of
Language and Social Interaction Research
(2010, Hampton Press)