Renowned scholar Michael L. Butterworth will present the Brigance Forum lecture at Wabash College in Korb Classroom, Fine Arts Center at 8 p.m. on Monday, March 26. The title of his talk is “Public Memory and Political Reconciliation at the Munich 1972 Massacre Memorial.”
Butterworth’s lecture is part of his developing book project on the 1972 Olympics and public memory in Germany. In it he considers the potential of the Munich 1972 Massacre Memorial as a rhetorical site of political reconciliation. Butterworth is the Director of the Center for Sports Communication and Media, and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in the study of connections between rhetoric, democracy, and sport with particular focus on questions of national identity, militarism, and public memory. He is author of the 2010 book Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National pastime and American Identity during the War on Terror and co-author of Communication and Sport: Surveying the Field (2017, 3rd Edition).
Butterworth has published more than 40 peer review articles, book chapters, and invited essays, appearing in leading journals in rhetoric and communication. He also contributes sport commentary to Reading the Pictures. Butterworth is the chair of the Communication and Sport Division for the National Communication Association and previously served as the Founding Executive Director of the International Association for Communication and Sport.
His talk is free and open to the public. A reception will be held following his talk in the Littell Lobby in the Fine Arts Center.