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Dr. Susan Balter-Reitz

Posted: 08.31.05

Dr. Susan Balter-Reitz ('97), Assistant Professor of Communication and Director of Graduate Studies at Montana State University, Billings is a 2005 recipient of the Winston and Helen Cox Fellowship.

Dr. Balter-Reitz has helped shape and strengthen the curriculum of the Department of Communication and Theatre since she began teaching at MSU-Billings three years ago.

Dr. Balter-Reitz has developed courses such as The Law of Public Communication, designed for those who hope to become journalists, to practice public relations, or work in any facet of the media or in government; Ethics of Public Relations; Applied Communication, where students are encouraged to examine the interdependence of their academic and professional responsibilities; Theories of Public Relations, a stand-alone graduate seminar; and Political Communication: the 2004 Election, by which students critically evaluated the communication strategies and products from various campaigns.

Dr. Balter-Reitz began her academic career as an argumentative theorist. The more she has investigated argument the more she is convinced that values are the basis of argumentation. She is guided in her current research program by a simple claim: the key to understanding how argument and rhetoric work is to understand the underlying value claims that operate in any persuasive form.

She has spent the past five years examining the ways in which visuals function as argument. She and a colleague have an article in press that was presented last year at the Visual Rhetoric Conference about how the photograph of the fence associated with Matthew Shepard's murder has redirected the discourse about his death away from traditional issues about crime onto issues about the nature of the place where his death occurred.

With the same colleague, Dr. Balter-Reitz currently is working on two articles: one examines the way in which Cody, Wyo., has positioned itself as the archetype of the West, via the visuals associated with tourist literature, the landscape of the town and the Buffalo Bill Historical Society; the other article examines the definitions of middle-class life that are advanced by commercial photography.

Dr. Balter-Reitz serves the University as a member of the Library Committee. and is an Arts and Sciences member of the University Graduate Committee. She also answers phone for Yellowstone Public Radio pledge drives.