Honors College

Professor Sheeler is the Executive Associate Dean of the Honors College and 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 becoming the Executive Associate Dean of the Honors College, she was the Associate Dean for Academic and Graduate Programs in the School of Liberal Arts and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in political communication, persuasion, and gender and communication, and has taught internationally in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Macedonia.

Her 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.

Professor Sheeler is a native Hoosier, earning her BS in English, Speech, and Theatre Education and her MA 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.