Dr. Peter Smudde, APR
Biography
Peter Smudde (Ph.D., 2000) is Professor and Associate Director in the School of Communication at Illinois State University. My focus was on communicaiton and rhetoric theory, with an out-of-department cognate in linguistics. I later published an expanded version of my disseration under the title of Public Relations as Dramatistic Organizing (Hampton Press, 2011).
My 36-year career path did not follow that of a traditional academic. I moved to academia in 2002 after 16 years of industry experience, during which I completed master’s and doctoral degrees. I'm also accredited in public relations (APR) through the PRSA. This path has been a great asset to me in my consulting, research, leading students in their studies and serving the university, the field and beyond. I love being a professor!
My teaching focuses on public relations courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The courses would involve everything from the introductory course to writing to strategy to research/scholarship. In all my courses I like to connect the dots between theory and practice because they inform and rely on each other. Also, in the design of my courses, I apply many of the practices and demands of "real world" public relations so students can become prepared for how they will be managed in their jobs. I see myself as the “lead student” in my classes because everyone shares in learning and teaching about the subject of a class.
In my research I have a few areas that have long interested me. The first and most prominent has been message design and PR discourse, which has been fueled by my observations about the intersection of rhetoric theory with pragmatic matters of organizations’ officials needing and wanting to say and do “the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reasons and the right people.” Because of my move from industry to academe, I also researche corporate strategy, teaching and learning of public relations, and religion and spirituality in the workplace, particularly for its role in public relations decision-making. All told in these areas, I've so far published 8 books, 21 journal articles and 15 book chapters (the greater majority of which he’s lead or solo author), presented 43 works for conferences, and published 31 invited pieces.