Faculty Experts Guide

Communication and theatre

Associate professor of communication and theatre

Specialties:

Environmental communication (including issues and movements), Public discourse, Free speech issues, Helen Gouger, Women's suffrage, Sedition, Love letters (how to write)

Bio:

Jennifer Adams has a fellowship to conduct archival research on free speech issues. In particular she is researching World War I-era women radicals who were imprisoned under the Sedition Act. Adams also studies and writes about Helen Gouger, an Indiana suffrage rights worker. Gouger's efforts were well known nationally, and she served as president of the American Suffragist Federation. Adams collaborated with an Indiana Supreme Court historian to write a play about Gouger and the fight for women's rights, and the play is performed several times a year in the Statehouse. Indiana celebrates its bicentennial in 2016.

Adams did her doctoral dissertation about the writing of love letters, particularly looking at a set of love letters that Adams found in the attic of a house in Lafayette, Ind. Using the letters written by a 1930s couple, Adams traced the stages of how a couple's relationship develops over time. From this work, she developed a set of Rules for How to Write Love Letters. In addition, she examined how the writing of love letters differs from the use of online media/email/social media.