Chicago Heights, IL–(ENEWSPF)– One of Prairie State College’s (PSC) adjunct professor recently won an award for her dissertation. English professor Kathleen Lamp was awarded the American Society for the History of Rhetoric (ASHR) Dissertation Award for 2009. The award is granted annually to the best dissertation by a member of ASHR.
The dissertation, “A City of Brick: Visual and Material Rhetoric in the Principate of Augustus,” examines how unconventional media such as coins, monuments, altars, and city planning influenced the Romans during the period between the Roman Republic and Empire. “I wanted to look at how the Roman people experienced their city and participated in their government,” says Lamp.
Lamp became interested in this topic when she studied abroad in Rome as an undergraduate student. She enjoyed the combination of rhetoric and archaeology and wanted to incorporate those topics into her dissertation.
Lamp says there are similarities between her own research and teaching at PSC. “I try to make my students conscientious producers and consumers of messages,” she says. One way she does this is through current events. She asks her students to keep up with national and international news and record them in a journal.
Lamp comes to PSC from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was a teaching assistant and earned her doctorate degree.