Research Interests
rhetoricpublic memorypopular cultureoral history
Opportunities
Work Study Positions Available: No
Grant Funded Positions Available: No
Course-Credit Research Opportunities Available: No
Volunteer Research Positions Available: No
Biography
Dr. Gatchet holds a B.A. in Speech Communication from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and he completed both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Language at the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches undergraduate courses in public speaking, communication theory, and rhetorical theory and criticism. At the graduate level he also teaches seminars that survey foundational theories of communication and rhetorical approaches to studying popular culture.
Dr. Gatchet's research focuses on the rhetoric of public memory and popular culture, as well as oral history. He has completed oral history projects interviewing blues musicians in Austin, Texas through partnerships with the Project in Interpreting the Texas Past and Baylor University's Institute for Oral History, which awarded him the Charlton Oral History Research Grant. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Oral History Association's Elizabeth B. Mason Project Award.
His most recent work explores the history and impact of civil rights tourism in the state of Mississippi. In August 2023, he published Terror and Truth: Civil Rights Tourism and the Mississippi Movement (University Press of Mississippi). Co-authored with Stephen A. King (St. Edward's University), Terror and Truth combines critical analysis, onsite fieldwork, and interviews with museum directors, local civil rights entrepreneurs, historians, and movement veterans to examine how Mississippi confronts its history of racial violence and injustice through civil rights tourism.
Dr. Gatchet's research also appears in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Western Journal of Communication, Southern Communication Journal, and Oral History Review, as well as chapters in edited book collections. He is a coauthor of Argumentation and Debate: A Public Speaking Approach (3rd ed.), and in 2018, he was the co-recipient of the Western States Communication Association's B. Aubrey Fisher Outstanding Journal Article Award. He is also a contributing writer and music critic for the magazine Living Blues. When he's not shepherding the defiant honeybees in his backyard apiary, Dr. Gatchet enjoys bread baking, gardening, and playing blues harmonica.
