Nicole Barnes is a lecturer in the School of Communication Studies. She has a BA in English from Clarion University, a MA in Literature and Rhetoric from State University of New York at Binghamton, and a PhD in Public Communication from Georgia State University.

Her scholarship investigates how socially constructed representations of gender roles act as a constraint upon women’s agency. A focus of her work is representations of the housewife in popular culture, and she has presented work on these mediated representations at prominent national and regional conferences. Her work has twice been recognized at these conferences as the top paper in her division. Her published scholarship investigates the domestic and international implications of the housewife as a gender constraint. Barnes published an article exploring the rhetorical significance of the housewife in the “Kitchen Debate” between President Nixon and Premier Khrushchev, arguing that “women’s work” impacted cultural understandings of the other during the Cold War. She and several co-authors also studied the rhetorical strategies utilized by Lucille Ball in the actress’s 1953 House Un-American Activities Committee testimony. For the latter, she and her coauthors were named 2022 Feminist Scholar of the Year by the Organization for Research on Women and Communication. She is currently studying absence as a potential for recovery in sites of public memory.

Barnes teaches SCOM 381: Rhetorical Methods, SCOM 280: Introduction to Communication Research Methods, SCOM 242: Presentational Speaking, and SCOM 123: Fundamentals of Human Communication.