Communication

Kevin Menken

Kevin Menken

Instructor
325 Memorial Hall
Department Main Office Phone: (309) 298-1507
Email: KB-Menken@wiu.edu

Kevin Menken is an associate faculty member in the Department of Communication at Western Illinois University and is currently serving as a co-adviser to Lambda Pi Eta and adviser to the TOMS shoes campus organization. He is currently and continually working to finishing his PhD at Southern Illinois University in Speech Communication. He earned a Master of Arts degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of South Carolina and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from the University of Illinois-Springfield. He primarily teaches undergraduate courses in communication and gender, argumentation, interviewing and public speaking. His research interests include pedagogy, representations and discourse in constructing identities of ostracized groups in media, and online communication application and theory.

He has presented several papers in regional and national conferences and participated on panels discussing online communication and the role of minorities in society. He has also published a chapter in an internationally-distributed textbook on minority representations in media. His work has garnered interviews with regional and national media as well as speaking engagements at several universities. As a journalist for two decades, he wrote and edited for more than a dozen newspapers and magazines and won awards for commentaries. As a graduate student, he served on several university governing committees at SIU and worked as a liaison on a training/development project through a grant to USC by the United States Information Agency.

Education

ABD in Speech Communication – Southern Illinois University-Carbondale
M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication – University of South Carolina
B.A. in Communication – University of Illinois-Springfield

Teaching Areas

Rhetoric
Interviewing
Communication and Minorities
Social influences

Research Interests

Theory and effects of online communication
Ostracized groups and social communication
Pedagogy