Leslie A. Hahner, associate professor of communication at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, was chosen to receive two awards from the National Communication Association. She will be the recipient of the James A. Winans and Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address and the Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award from the Public Address Division of the National Communication Association. She will receive the awards at the association’s 104th annual convention in Salt Lake City in November.
Dr. Hahner was honored for her book To Become an American: Immigrants and Americanization Campaigns of the Early Twentieth Century (Michigan State University Press, 2017). In the book, Dr. Hahner argues that in the early twentieth century Americanization was a massive campaign designed to fashion immigrants into perfect Americans — those who were loyal in word, deed, and heart. She contends that Americanization not only tutored students in the practices of citizenship but also created a normative visual metric that modified how Americans would come to understand, interpret, and judge their own patriotism and that of others.
Dr. Hahner is a graduate of what is now the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, where she majored in organizational communication. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in communication studies from the University of Iowa.