We Asked Alum Leland Spencer for Advice Leland Spencer today and back in 2013 as a freshly minted PhD. This month we are proud to catch up a bit with Prof. Leland Spencer, who got his PhD with us in 2013. We were sad to see him go but delighted that he found a wonderful home at the Department of Interdisciplinary & Communication Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Starting this year, Dr. Spencer is Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Spencer has taken home more awards than we can list in his decade of studying feminist rhetoric, gender, and religion. Just this year, his 2023 book Rape, Agency, and Carceral Solutions received two awards at the National Communication Association: the Sue DeWine Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the Applied Communication Division and the Outstanding Book Award from the American Studies Division. If you want to talk numbers, a 2023 study of the field listed him among the top 25 most prolific scholars in terms of journal article publication. Not only that, he came in at a cool 5th place. (See “Scholarly productivity in communication studies: a five-year review (2017–2021)” in Communication Education). How did he do it? We asked him to share some words of wisdom for young scholars. Embrace curiosity! Intellectual life is about asking questions, coming up with some provisional answers, and then posing even better questions. While everyone must specialize, your narrow area of expertise should function as a starting point rather than a limitation on the sorts of questions you can ask. That's my philosophical advice. My pragmatic advice is to revise, revise, revise. Publication is more about persistence than brilliance, so when you know you have a good idea, keep working on it. It can be discouraging to get harsh feedback from professors or reviewers, but the best response is to make it better. The easier path is throwing away the manuscript, filing it and forgetting it, never opening it again. The more excellent way, though, requires more work. Make it better, send it somewhere else, and it will find a home. Thanks for the advice. Come back and see us sometime, Leland! Photos of the 2016 Alumni Reunion can be found here!
