Biography

Robert Morris University - Communication

University Professor at Robert Morris University
Higher Education
AJ
Grant
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
I am a University Professor of Organizational Studies at Robert Morris University. I currently teach undergraduate and graduate courses in communications, history of leadership and ethics, and have offered a variety of professional workshops on writing and professional communication in corporate settings. This is my eighteenth year at RMU. Before that I worked a variety of jobs--minister, corrections officer, probation officer, bus driver, taxi driver, school bus driver, rent-a-tech at the Fermi National Accelerator lab, 3rd helper in steel mill foundries, a chauffeur, and many more.

I worked as a manager for fifteen of these years--as a minister I managed the entire church staff (5 years), as a probation officer I managed a huge caseload of out of county probationers (3 years), as head of the English Department at RMU I managed seventy faculty and staffed 100+ courses each semester ( 5 1/2 years), and as director of our doctoral program in IS and Communication I worked with faculty from a number of disciplines, recruited students, and staffed courses (1 year). In short, I am no stranger to organizational and leadership issues and problems.

My research interests include writing in the academic disciplines and professions, literary and rhetorical criticism, the history of communication and popular culture topics. I have published articles on these topics in scholarly journals like the Journal of American Culture, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Leadership and the Humanities. I received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and English from Northern Illinois University, an MAT from Wheaton Graduate School, and M. Div. from McCormick Seminary, and a BA in English Literature and Writing from the University of Pittsburgh.