Professor Emeritus Linda Brigance of the Department of Communication recently donated her dissertation research materials to the Iowa Women’s History Archives at the University of Iowa.
Dr. Brigance’s dissertation, “Rhetoric, Reasoning, and Relevance: Theorizing Public Controversy” (1999) used the 1992 Iowa Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) referendum controversy as a case study to examine audience standards of reasonableness and relevance and the role of those standards in collective decision making. The donated collection includes transcripts of interviews with state and national leaders of both the pro and anti-ERA factions and primary documents such as organizational newsletters and brochures; news releases; print, television and radio advertising; and, political ephemera.
Shortly after the archives received the materials, Karen Mason, archive curator, reported that she “used them with our graduate students as a teaching tool to demonstrate how to process a collection. So they have been an educational resource for learning about matters archival as well as the ERA.”
Dr Brigance retired from the Communication department in September 2015 and currently lives on Orchard Park.
