Michael L. Butterworth is Director and Associate Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Ohio University. His research investigates the relationships between rhetoric, democracy, and sport. In particular, he is interested in the extent to which commercialized sport may enrich or diminish democratic culture. He is the author of Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity during the War on Terror, published in 2010 by the University of Alabama Press, and co-author (with Andrew Billings and Paul Turman) of the textbook, Communication and Sport: Surveying the Field. Butterworth’s scholarship has been published in journals such as Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Communication & Sport, Communication, Culture, & Critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Journal of Communication, the Journal of Sport & Social Issues, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. He also contributes to the websites BagNews (http://www.bagnewsnotes.com) and The Vision Machine (http://thevisionmachine.com). Butterworth also serves as the founding Executive Director of the International Association for Communication and Sport (http://communicationandsport.com), an academic organization “dedicated to the practice, instruction, and study of sport as a communicative phenomenon.” The IACS welcomes scholars from a range of disciplines, including communication studies, journalism, sport sociology, and sport management. Butterworth earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington. He also has an M.A. in Communication and a B.A. in Political Science from Northern Illinois University.
