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Dave Tell

Professor of Communication Studies & Co-Director, Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities

Headshot of Dave Tell of the University of Kansas

Dave Tell is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth Century America (Penn State University Press, 2012) and Remembering Emmett Till (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Remembering Emmett Till was listed as a 2019 book of the year by the Economist and winner of the Mississippi Historical Society’s 2020 McLemore Prize.  

Professor Tell is a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a codirector of the Emmett Till Memory Project. His writing on the Till murder has been published in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, LitHub and a wide range of academic journals. He is a past president of the American Society for the History of Rhetoric and the inaugural Public Humanities Officer for the Rhetoric Society of America. 

Professor Tell is also Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities and a Faculty Fellow in the University Honors Program. He holds courtesy appointments in American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 

University of Kansas