About Berkley Conner
Berkley Conner is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies with a graduate certificate in Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research is at the intersection of rhetorics of health and medicine, reproductive justice, and rhetorical historiography, and her dissertation traces how menstrual discourses shape larger struggles over bodily autonomy and health care and equity. Berkley loves teaching and studying periods, but also playing tennis, volunteering, seeing movies at the theater, and traveling to visit her friends who are scattered across the country.
Education
Ph.D., University of Iowa (in progress)
M.A., Ball State University
B.S., Ball State University
Research Interests
- Rhetorics of Health and Medicine
- Rhetorical Historiography
- Biopolitics and Containment
- Feminist Studies
Teaching
COMM 322 Communication and Popular Culture
COMM 375 Advanced Presentation Design and Delivery
Awards and Honors
- Jane A. Weiss Memorial Dissertation Scholarship, Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, University of Iowa, 2023
- Dissertation Writing Fellowship, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa, 2021
- Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, Council on Teaching, University of Iowa, 2020
- Carroll Arnold Fellowship, Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa, 2019
Service
- Department of Communication Studies Alumni Engagement Committee
Selected Publications
- “Menstrual Histories, Reproductive Futures.” Women and Language. 46, no. 1 (2023). 257-261
- “Mapping Redesign: Gynecological Power and Project Yona’s Speculum.” Women’s Studies in Communication 44, no. 4 (2021). 611-631.
- “Menstrual Trolls: The Collective Rhetoric of Periods for Pence,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, ed. Chris Bobel, Inga T. Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling, & Tomi-Ann Roberts (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), 885-900.
