Mary Triece is a Professor in the School of Communication and Director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Akron. Dr. Triece’s areas of teaching and research center on rhetorical studies and social movements. Triece has published six books focusing on women’s contributions to social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the award winning, Urban Renewal and Resistance: Race, Space, and the City in the Late 20th to Early 21st Century. Triece’s most recent books are Radical Advocate: Ida B. Wells and the Road to Race and Gender Justice (2025, University of Alabama Press) and Memory Work: White Ignorance and Black Resistance in Popular Magazines, 1900-1910 (2024, University Press of Mississippi).    

As Director of the Women’s Studies Program, Triece has worked to create programming centering issues pertaining to sexuality, gender, and intersectionality. Additionally, Triece is dedicated to prison education. She has received training from the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program to teach Inside-Out courses in corrections facilities. In spring 2025, Triece taught Argumentation at the Cliff Skeen Community Based Correctional Facility in Akron. Triece has also taught at the Northeast Reintegration Center in Cleveland.

Dr. Jessica Graves-Rack is an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati, where she serves as the School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies’ Communication Undergraduate Director and Basic Course Director. She teaches a variety of courses at UC, including: Gender and Communication, Advanced Theories of Interpersonal Communication, Communication Theory, Communication Research Methods, Public Speaking, and Communication in Problem-Solving Groups. As the School’s teaching practicum professor, she mentors MA/PhD Students as they learn to teach their own sections of public speaking. 

Jessica’s approach to teaching prioritizes critical thinking skills, goal-directed learning, applicability of theory, effective communication of information, and inclusion and diversity. She aims for innovation and creativity in the classroom. She believes that her own enthusiasm for teaching and the subject matter helps to stimulate enthusiasm on behalf of the students.  While maintaining strict standards of academic rigor, she cultivates classroom interactions that students enjoy and describe as fun. 

Jessica has previously won the Ohio Communication Association’s Distinguished New Teacher award (2021). She has also won the Communication Professor of the Year (2020) and the Communication Professor of the Year: Above and Beyond Professor (2021) awards at the University of Cincinnati, and has been nominated for the George C. Barbour Award for Good Faculty-Student Relations (2020), Mrs. A. B. “Dolly” Cohen Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022), and the University of Cincinnati Graduate College Master’s Mentorship Award (2024).  

Leslie Muhlbach is a nationally recognized award-winning educator and public speaking coach. During her time in the high school classroom, she served as the Director of Speech and Debate at both Jackson High School in Massillon and Gahanna Lincoln High School near Columbus. While at Jackson, she led the growth and success of the program to include 2 team titles at the Ohio Speech and Debate Association state tournament. Additionally, she coached numerous students to individual state titles, and national final rounds of competition. At both schools, she developed the curriculum for numerous courses in debate and rhetoric, performing arts, and public speaking. In 2013, Leslie was inducted into the Ohio Speech and Debate Association coaches Hall of Fame. She was most proud that day to join her mother on stage, Bobbie Muhlbach, who was also an award-winning speech teacher and Hall of Fame coach.

After moving to Gahanna, she served as the Columbus District Chair and on the Board of Directors for The Ohio Speech and Debate Association. Leslie is proud to have led the initiative to expand Speech and Debate programs to currently serve more than 20 Columbus area high schools. Respectively, she was awarded the Diversity and Inclusion Award in Leadership which recognized her commitment to developing policies and procedures, revising curriculum, and expanding opportunities for equitable access and continued success for students in speech and debate competition.

Leslie was named Educator of the Year in 2021 by the National Speech and Debate Association. She was honored for her exceptional teaching and coaching in speech and debate, development of academic programming for local schools, and instructional coaching in collaborative communications. Leslie attributes her success as a coach and effectiveness as a teacher to the community and administrative support she received in both school districts. Gahanna Lincoln High School is one of the few remaining public schools still requiring Public Speaking for graduation. Leslie shared, “It was a dream job to teach ALL students the power of voice, not just to the students who elected to be there!” She added, “There are very few limits when the Superintendent, Board President, and Principal look you in the eye and with sincerity ask, ‘What can we do to support you?’ And I know that was not the case for so many of my colleagues who continually felt caught in a war of resources with sports and other programs.”

Recently, Leslie has followed a deep calling to step away from the high school classroom and begin a new journey as a writer, keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, and instructional designer in the fields of health and wellness. Leslie’s mission is to build and support connected communities through her study of the critical role compassionate communication plays in building individual confidence and resilient relationships.

Nancy Schulte is an Annual Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. With twenty-four years of experience, Professor Schulte has taught Communication and English courses as an adjunct instructor across several universities and colleges, including the Clifton and Blue Ash campuses. Since 2009, she has taught four different courses at the University of Cincinnati including Interpersonal Communication, Business Communication, Introduction to Public Speaking, and Communication in Groups-Problem Solving. She has a Master of Education in Adult Education/English Concentration from Xavier University and 18 credit-hours of graduate-level Communication coursework from the University of Cincinnati.

Through her other work experience in corporate training and public speaking, she has provided her students a blend of knowledge and expertise from academia and the business world. In addition to this full range background, Nancy pursued expanding her expertise through attending conferences, taking classes, and recently, becoming certified through the Support for Online Course Design to continue with online instruction.

Nancy demonstrates professionalism along with warmth and compassion. She puts her students first in order to help them succeed. As a professor at U.C.’s main campus and its branch campus, she proposed a joint student organization between the two campuses, called Orange Band, in an effort to promote an easy transition for students from a two-year college to a four-year university.

Professor Schulte feels that students learn best in a relaxed, open, and fun environment. This is reflected in her course evaluations as her students have noted that she dedicates herself to giving them an enjoyable, thorough, and experienced transmission of knowledge. Consequently, she received an acknowledgement by the First-Year Experience students for excellence in teaching.

Previously, Rayna conducted significant research on Kashmiri languages and explored Kashmiri discourse through linguistic frames of analysis. She completed her MS in linguistics and then became a doctoral student in communication studies.

Rayna Batool is a final-year doctoral student at Ohio University. Her primary areas of teaching include public speaking, argument analysis and advocacy, and communication among cultures. She recently published in the areas of post-colonial discourse analysis and corpus-based discourse analysis.

Rayna’s current primary research focus is on Kashmiri culture, oral literature, and narrative scarcity in Kashmir, and her secondary research focus is on higher education curricula. Her methodological expertise encompasses rhetoric, culture, corpus, Kenneth Burke, and discourse analysis.

Usman Bah is currently a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies, where his research focuses on health and environmental (climate narratives) communication. As a Graduate Student Research Assistant and Coordinator for the Community Engagement Core at the Center for Collaboration on Climate and Community for Health (C4H)—an NIH-funded P20 Center—Usman plays a central role in studying the health impacts of extreme climate events affecting communities in the Ohio River Valley.

Demonstrating strong leadership within academic circles, Usman serves as President of the Communication Graduate Student Association and as its Representative to the Graduate Student Government, where he actively advocates for graduate student interests and well-being.

In 2025, Usman was awarded the Waterhouse Family Institute Research Grant as Co-Principal Investigator, alongside Dr. Shaunak Sastry, for the project “We’re Going Extinct: Documenting Narratives of Climate Change, Cultural Extinction, and Community Resettlement in Three Coastal Communities in Sierra Leone.” This externally funded study reflects his ongoing commitment to both research and community engagement in issues of environmental health.

Prior to his doctoral studies, Usman gained substantial experience in project management, research, and advocacy through his work with the Media Reform Coordinating Group (MRCG) in Sierra Leone. With the MRCG, he led and contributed to initiatives supporting media and press freedom, engaged in research and worked on projects that addressed local governance, transitional justice, and climate change awareness raising and responses, building a strong background in community-focused action and public communication.