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Linda Putnam Named ICA President-elect

Linda L. Putnam, Texas A&M U, College Station, was chosen the next president-elect of ICA in recent association-wide balloting. Pamela Shoemaker, Syracuse U, was runner-up.

"I'm looking forward to this leadership role in ICA as we move forward into the next century-one that will be shaped by communication, technology, and globalization," says Putnam.

Barbara O'Keefe, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was elected a board member-at-large, and Soren Matei, U of Southern California, was named a student board member.

Putnam will take office as president-elect at the close of the 48th ICA annual conference to be held in July 1998 in Jerusalem. One of her first responsibilities will be to serve as program chair for the 1999 conference in San Francisco. Putnam also will serve on the ICA executive committee and on the board of directors. It will be her job to draft the call for papers for the San Francisco convention and to appoint the nominating committee to choose the slate of officer candidates for 1999 balloting.

Putnam is professor and head of the Department of Speech Communication at Texas A&M, where she also coordinates the Program on Conflict and Dispute Resolution, an interdisciplinary research unit in the Bush School of Public Affairs. She has served on the faculty of Purdue U and as a visiting scholar at Harvard, Stanford, and the U of California, Berkeley; written over 70 research articles and book chapters; been editor of special issues of Communication Research and Management Communication Quarterly and on editorial boards of various professional publications.

An ICA Fellow, Putnam has served the association in a number of capacities: as chair of the publications, nominating, and membership committees, as well the Committee on Structures and Procedures and the committee that developed the concept for Communication Theory. Putnam is a former chair of the Organizational Communication Division and outstanding member of that division in 1993. She is active in several other professional associations and received NCA's Charles H. Woolbert Award for original and innovative research in the field, also in 1993.

In seeking this office, Putnam outlined three goals for the association centered on providing "opportunities to demonstrate that knowledge about communication makes a difference in our lives." Those goals are (1) to capitalize on recent ties with other communication associations through active participation in the Council of Communication Associations and to take a leadership role in promoting the discipline to external agencies; (2) to form and strengthen bonds with allied disciplines and improve forums for interdisciplinary activities; and (3) to support cross-divisional research projects on public issues and develop ways to disseminate this knowledge to the general public.

Other ICA election results