Communication Arts is proud to welcome Professor Adriana Angel from Universidad de Manizales in Colombia to UW-Madison for the Spring 2025 semester. Professor Angel is the Tinker Visiting Professor, a prestigious award many influential scholars and public figures have received.
The generosity of the Tinker Foundation has allowed the UW LACIS program (Latin American Caribbean and Iberian Studies) to host numerous visiting professors from Latin America for nearly 25 years. It is an honor to collaborate with LACIS and be the host department for Professor Angel, an opportunity that provides Communication Arts students a chance to connect with an important rhetorical scholar.
Professor Angel received her undergraduate degree in Mass Communications and Journalism from the Universidad de Manizales. After receiving her master’s in communication, she applied for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the United States at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. There, she received her Ph.D. in Communication Studies and learned about communication in both the education system and how it’s organized in the United States as a whole.
Her research has since questioned the role of rhetoric in democratic political structures throughout countries in Latin America. Many of her books and articles analyze acts of corruption and how they shape democracy. She is also interested in connecting professors from Latin America and North America to discuss dialogue and issues in communications.
Angel described the Visiting Tinker Professorship as an interesting compliment to the opportunity she was awarded with her Fulbright Scholarship. “One of the biggest honors of my life has been the Fulbright Scholarship because it gave me the opportunity to come to the United States, learn, and then go back to Colombia and share the knowledge I learned,” she said. The Tinker Professorship is the opposite and invited her to share what she has been studying in Latin America with the United States.
This spring, Professor Angel will be teaching the fully-enrolled course CA310: Rhetoric and Social Change in Latin America. The class explores the very idea of Latin America and poses questions to students such as, “why is it called Latin, what is America, and what does it mean to be Latino?” These questions allow students to examine different rhetorics that centers around the concept of Latin America.
Professor Angel says her hope is for students to “think critically about regions, not just Latin America, and apply the ideas from class to understand how complex people, cultures, political problems, and geographies are.”
Communication Arts is grateful to have Professor Angel with us this semester and cannot wait to see all the engaging work students in her course create throughout the Spring semester.