Honors College

Kristy Sheeler is the dean of the Honors College, and she has an appointment as a professor of communication studies at IUPUI. She has been at IUPUI since 2002 when she joined the faculty in the Department of Communication Studies. Prior to her current role, Sheeler was the executive associate dean of the Honors College, the associate dean for academic and graduate programs in the School of Liberal Arts, and the chair of the Department of Communication Studies. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in political communication, persuasion, and gender and communication, and has taught internationally in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Macedonia.

Sheeler’s research is in the area of gender and political communication, studying the ways that political candidate identity is contested and constructed in popular media, political discourse, journalism, and punditry. Her most recent book, Woman President: Confronting Postfeminist Political Culture (2013, Texas A&M UP) co-authored with Karrin Vasby Anderson, assesses the debilitating frames through which the 2008 candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were presented to the public. Woman President won the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender’s outstanding book award in 2014 as well as the National Communication Association’s 2014 James A. Winans—Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address. She is also the co-author, with Anderson, of Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity (2005, Lexington Books) and has published multiple book chapters as well as essays and reviews in scholarly journals such as Women’s Studies in Communication, Communication Quarterly, Presidential Studies Quarterly, White House Studies, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs.

Sheeler is a native Hoosier, earning her Bachelor of Science in English, Speech, and Theatre Education and her Master of Arts in Speech Communication from Ball State University, where she was also an honors student. She earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in Speech Communication with a graduate minor in Cultural Studies.