Kelly Jakes, PH.D.

Associate Professor

Education

M.A. and Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

B.A., Furman University

Research Interests

Kelly Jakes’ research program focuses broadly on issues pertaining to rhetoric and culture, with special attention to social movements, resistance, and music. She examines how marginalized or dissident citizens use verbal and nonverbal discourse to build solidarity, reassign political authority, and contest norms of national identity, gender, race, and class. Overall, her work combines concepts of subjectivity and performance with the deeply contextualized study of communication.

Courses Taught

COMM 280, COMM 281, COMM 410, COMM 480, COMM 481

Selected Publications

Kelly Jakes, Strains of Dissent: Popular Music and Everyday Resistance in WWII France, 1940-1945. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019.

Kelly Jakes, “‘Natural’ Virtuosos: Paradoxical Polysemy and the Rhetoric of the Fisk Jubilee Singers,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108:3 (2022): 271-291.

Jennifer Keohane and Kelly Jakes, “Soldiers and Scholars: Evaluating Female Engagement Teams in the War in Afghanistan,” Women’s Studies in Communication 44:1 (2021): 102- 118.

Kelly Jakes and Sarah Walker, "Crafty Capitalism: Arts and Crafts Ideology in Vaudeville Advertising," Western Journal of Communication 84:2 (2020): 168-185.

Kelly Jakes, "Songs of Our Fathers: Gender and Nationhood at the Liberation of France," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 20 :3 (2017): 3 85-419. [Lead article]

Kelly Jakes, "La France en Chantant: The Rhetorical Construction of French Identity in Songs of the Resistance Movement," Quarterly Journal of Speech 99:3 (2013): 317-340.