Michael P. Graves

Michael P. Graves (not the architect and teapot designer) has taught a wide variety of courses ranging from film, visual rhetoric, and the rhetoric of popular music for nearly five decades (he began teaching at the age of twelve). Humor has served him well in the positions of department and division chair and associate dean at a variety of universities. He has been awarded four NEH Summer Seminar fellowships and is a past president of the Religious Communication Association, three times miraculously winning their best essay award (1985, 2001, and 2008) and Book of the Year (2010). His scholarly work includes studies of Quaker preaching, studies of visual rhetoric, and explorations into the rhetorical features of popular music. More than forty of his essays and reviews have been published in edited books and journals, which include Quarterly Journal of Speech, Studies in Popular Culture, Review of Religious Research, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Journal of Communication and Religion, and Quaker Studies. He and the late David Fillingim co-edited and contributed to a volume of critical essays on Southern Gospel Music, More than “Precious Memories”: The Rhetoric of Southern Gospel Music (Mercer University Press, 2004), which received the 2005 Ray and Pat Brown Award from the Popular Culture Association for the best edited book in Popular Culture Studies. Michael’s latest writing project, Preaching the Inward Light, the product of nearly four decades of research and writing on early Quaker impromptu preaching, was published in 2009 by Baylor University Press. Michael has directed twenty-eight doctoral dissertations and seventeen MA theses. He is also a published poet. Graves has been a university professor since the 1960's. He now resides with his spouse, Darlene, in Oxnard, California, where they enjoy the cool ocean breeze in the late afternoon.