Assistant Professor of Performance and Communication Arts Traci Fordham-Hernandez became a professor because she wanted to be a lifelong student of communication.

“I saw communication studies as an interdisciplinary—or metadisciplinary—field, bridging and connecting psychology, sociology, anthropology, critical studies, gender studies and other areas,” she says. 

She received her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin in 1986 and 1988 respectively, and received her Ph.D. in social sciences and intercultural communication, as well as a Graduate Certificate in women’s studies, from Syracuse University in 2002.

What does she most enjoy about what she does? “Watching students fall in love with questions and become dedicated to exploring the answers to them, or trying to ask different questions,” she says.  One of her most rewarding experiences at St. Lawrence was seeing her first First-Year Program cohort graduate.

Fordham-Hernandez continues to examine and pursue many research opportunities. She holds a grant to continue research on multi-ethnic families. “I’m interested in how dominant discourses around ‘mixed’ racial identities are negotiated by families who define themselves as multi-racial or multi-ethnic,” she explains. “I’m also doing research and writing about dialog and intergroup communication and their links to democracy and civic engagement. I continue to do research and write about travel, intercultural communication, and ‘cross’-cultural adaptation.  Given that teaching is about communication, I’ve also become interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning.”

“Central to the aims of liberal learning—in any field-- is cultivating in our students the ability to be more critical and engaged communicators.  This means that, regardless of the discipline, students should become better readers, writers, speakers, listeners and critical thinkers,” she says.  “Performance and communication arts is the exploration of all of the contexts and situations wherein people make meaning and render the world meaningful with and for others.”