Caitlin Bruce won a National Communication Association book award

Caitlin Bruce, an associate professor in the Kenneth P. Deitrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Communication, has earned national recognition for her scholarship exploring youth culture and graffiti as public expression.

Bruce was awarded the James A. Winans and Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address by the National Communication Association (NCA) for her 2024 book “Voices in Aerosol: Youth Culture, Institutional Attunement, and Graffiti in Urban Mexico.”

The NCA committee praised “Voices in Aerosol,” saying its “innovative combination of rhetorical theory, urban studies and visual culture challenges traditional notions of public address, expanding the field’s boundaries by incorporating nonverbal forms of communication.”

Founded in 1914, the NCA is a membership-based scholarly society dedicated to advancing communication as a discipline and supporting scholars, teachers and communication professionals through research, teaching, public engagement and advocacy. The Winans-Wichelns Award is one of the association’s highest honors, recognizing a book published in the previous year that makes a distinguished contribution to the study of rhetoric and public address.

Bruce joined Pitt after earning her PhD in Communication Studies at Northwestern University, where she also served as a fellow in the Paris Program in Critical Theory. Her research investigates how public art interacts with institutions and how those institutional frameworks shape and constrain creative expression.

Read more about Bruce’s research in Pittwire.

Photography by Aimee Obidzinski