Bentley Professor of English and Media Studies Gesa Kirsch is the recipient of the 2015-2016 Mee Family Prize. Established by Bentley alumnus Michael Mee (’66) and his wife Judy to encourage and recognize excellence in research, the $25,000 prize and lifetime achievement award is presented annually to a senior member of the faculty to honor outstanding, internationally acclaimed scholarship and exemplary contributions to Bentley’s faculty, students, and alumni. Dr. Kirsch’s work spans a range of ethical, feminist, and rhetorical dimensions, and fuses arts and sciences research with leading business questions.
As Provost Mike Page acknowledged in the award citation, “Dr. Kirsch’s scholarship is highly original and she is frequently consulted as an authority on new methodological work as well as on the future of graduate education in rhetorical studies. Her work on ethics is also considered seminal in the field, spawning a whole set of research studies that follow on her heels.”
Celebrating a Lifetime of Outstanding Research
Dr. Kirsch was a founding member of Bentley’s Research Council and, as past director of the Valente Center for the Arts & Sciences, brought major national and international scholars to campus to foster transdisciplinary conversations and enrich the intellectual life of the university.
She frequently collaborates with colleagues from different institutions, and she has held major leadership positions in her field. In the spring of 2015 she served as the Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University in recognition of her status as “an eminent scholar in rhetoric and writing studies.”
Dr. Kirsch won the James Braddock Award for the best article in College Composition and Communication and the Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award for Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies (co-authored with Jacqueline Jones Royster). In 2013 she won the Excellence in Scholarship Award from Bentley in recognition of her accumulated record of scholarly productivity and leadership in the discipline.
She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited eight books with major university presses and has published more than thirty articles in academic journals. In 2008 Kirsch published Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, a volume that continues to enjoy tremendous success amongst an interdisciplinary readership. Her other single-authored works include: Ethical Dilemmas in Feminist Research: The Politics of Location, Interpretation, and Publication—a volume that examines the ethical dimensions of qualitative and collaborative research methods—and Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation—a volume that analyzes the writing and research experiences of academic women across different disciplines and ranks.
Dr. Kirsch was elected to a three-year term on the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. She has served as an invited member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography’s Advisory Board, as Associate Executive Director for Higher Education for the National Council of Teachers of English for three years, and as an invited member of the advisory committee for the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research.
The Mee family established the Mee Prize with an endowed gift in 2011. Past recipients include Dr. Jean C. Bedard, Dr. W. Michael Hoffman, and Dr. M. Lynn Markus.