Leslie A. Hahner, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication Baylor University
- Waco TX
Expert scholar and speaker with a wealth of knowledge on the role of images in public culture
Media
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Diane S. Hope Book of the Year Award
National Communication Association
2018
James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address
National Communication Association
2018
Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award
National Communication Association
2018
Library Fellow
Baylor University
2017
Education
The University of Iowa
Ph.D.
Communication Studies (Rhetorical Studies)
The University of Iowa
M.A.
Communication Studies (Rhetorical Studies)
Central Missouri State University
B.A.
Organizational Communication
Media Appearances
Memes for Humanity: The Power of Public Imagination | Leslie Hahner
TEDxBaylor University online
2025-12-04
Disinformation is a top global security risk. In this TedX talk, Professor Hahner breaks down how she educates students on the human choices involved in disinformation. With heartwarming stories, Hahner explains how and why the future can be what our imaginations generate.
Love: the antidote to political division, civil discourse panel says
Baylor Lariat online
2024-10-17
Dr. Leslie Hahner, a professor in the communications department, was on the panel and said that love heals contention brought by politics.
“To love those who disagree with us, even those who hate us, is an incredibly powerful commandment,”Hahner said, “and that commandment, as we enact it, allows us a way to heal our broken political hostilities.”
Meaning of flag seen outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's home has changed | Voices
UPI online
2024-05-30
Homes owned by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito have flown flags linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the general effort of Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer
CNN tv
2024-05-23
Scholars say the Appeal to Heaven flag was first flown during the Revolutionary War as a symbol against British tyranny, but now some believe it means something different.
PROF. LESLIE HAHNER, CO-AUTHOR, MAKE AMERICA MEME AGAIN, THE RHETORIC OF THE ALT-RIGHT: Now the flag symbolizes both that the nation that we live in should be a Christian nation, but also that the steal of the 2020 election should be stopped.
How ‘Karen’ Became a Coronavirus Villain
The Atlantic online
2020-05-06
Karen memes that are specific to the coronavirus context are at least more coherent than many of their predecessors. “The circumstances of COVID have sharpened the critique,” says Leslie Hahner, a co-author of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right. Hahner cited an image that showed a white woman with blonde hair pointing a handgun at the camera, with the caption “Open the TJ Maxx.” That particular Karen is insisting she deserves exception even in the midst of a pandemic, and is more compelling than some wholly imaginary abstraction of privilege.
The meme endorsement you might have missed – and why it matters for 2020
The Conversation online
2020-01-28
Memes played a role in 2016 – and they’re set to play an even bigger one in 2020.
How mainstream media helps weaponize far-right conspiracy theories
The Conversation online
2018-11-30
Are there invisible forces at work in the world?
Articles
Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression
Quarterly Journal of Speech2018
I echo Calafell’s desires,“I came in search of monsters, and monsters I found”(55). As I turned the final page of her book, I became keenly aware of the cultural pulse of monstrosity but also the theoretical lens monstrosity offers to my understanding of myself, Others, and dominant cultural norms. I encourage others to take the journey through Calafell’s theoretical explanations of monstrosity and expand their understandings of feminism, feminist theory, and embodied acts. As Calafell eloquently points out,“Monsters are everywhere”(118). Certainly, monsters are everywhere, whether we choose to see them or not, that in-and-of itself is a statement of one’s privilege.
Black Panther and the Alt-right: networks of racial ideology
Critical Studies in Media Communication2020
This essay analyzes how far-right paratexts enunciate and circulate frameworks of interpretation that situate the film, Black Panther, as a Trumpian homage. Such rubrics travel through an interconnected media ecosystem and use the film to promote the views of the far-right, adoration for Donald Trump, and a postracial, neoliberal worldview. Analysis of these paratexts demonstrates how white supremacy relies on a wealth of circulated logics that can be deployed thru novel texts and considers the implications of contemporary media environments for ideological formations.
Misogynoir and the public woman: analog and digital sexualization of women in public from the Civil War to the era of Kamala Harris
Quarterly Journal of Speech2024
This essay identifies how the very conception of public woman is infused with the opprobrium hurled against a wanton woman – a sexualized figure who has lost claims to moral standing or social worth. Our analysis begins diachronically by using thin description to trace the historical conflation of public woman in general, and Black woman in particular, with prostitute to outline the contours of the trope of public woman that have solidified across time. We document how the public woman became equated with prostitute, and then how the label prostitute was affixed to women in public to situate them as promiscuous or prurient.
