The Religious Communication Association is pleased to announce that Mark Ward Sr. is our Scholar of the Year. Professor Ward Sr. joined RCA in 2009, earned his Ph.D. in rhetorical and communication studies from Clemson University in 2010, and since then has served on the faculty of the University of Houston-Victoria, where he’s a full professor of communication. His ethnographic research on religious communication and media has been published in over 40 scholarly articles and essays. He’s authored, coauthored, or edited eight books—including The Electronic Church in the Digital Age, for which he received the Clifford G. Christians Ethics Research Award, and this year’s RCA Edited Volume of the Year, God Talk: The Problem of Divine-Human Communication. The awards selection committee wrote, “We believe that God Talk will significantly impact our field, stimulating new conversations and inspiring further research on this crucial topic.”
Dr. Ward’s latest book will be released next month. Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity takes his 20 years of ethnographic research on American evangelical culture and makes it accessible in a single volume for general and scholarly readers. And for the first time, Dr. Ward incorporates autoethnographic research from his own experiences in evangelical culture. His textbooks include Introduction to Public Speaking: An Inductive Approach, and the coauthored Organizational Communication: Theory, Research, and Practice.
Dr. Ward has served as our Electronic Communications Curator since 2014 on the RCA Executive Council. He’s a three-time winner of the RCA Article of the Year Award. He has also received the David R. Maines Narrative Research Award, Digital Religion Research Award, and this year’s Outstanding Community Activism/Engagement/Service Award from the NCA Spiritual Communication Division. In addition, he’s received his institution’s highest awards for scholarship and service.
Before entering academia, Dr. Ward was communications director and journal editor for national nonprofit and religious organizations. As an independent writer, he’s authored more than 2,000 magazine features, and as a broadcaster, his experience ranges from local radio announcer and deejay to national program syndication and voice talent.