Rate My Professor Danielle Endres

Danielle Endres is a Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, a position she has held since 2005, progressing from Assistant Professor (2005-2012) to Associate Professor (2012-2017) and full Professor thereafter. She earned her Ph.D. in Speech Communication and Rhetoric from the University of Washington in 2005. In addition to her faculty role, Endres serves as Director of the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah, a program that launched the same year she joined the institution. Her academic interests center on environmental communication, rhetorical theory and criticism, social movements, and Indigenous studies. As a rhetorical scholar, she employs participatory methods including ethnography, oral history, and interviewing to analyze controversies such as nuclear de/colonization in the American West, energy policy, climate change, Native American mascots, and dominant spatial practices.

Endres's research has significantly influenced discussions on environmental justice and energy democracy. Her fourth book, Nuclear Decolonization: Indigenous Resistance to High-Level Nuclear Waste Siting (Ohio State University Press, 2023), details Indigenous activism against nuclear waste repositories, reframing nuclear colonialism as a struggle for land return. Other key publications include co-authored Participatory Critical Rhetoric, which received the Outstanding Book of the Year Award from the Critical & Cultural Studies Division, and contributions to energy democracy literature such as the 2019 editorial 'A Research Agenda for Energy Democracy' and the 2023 chapter 'Energy Democracy's Relationship to Ecology.' She has secured major funding, including National Science Foundation grants for Research Experiences for Undergraduates on energy issues and fieldwork in Puerto Rico on just energy transitions, as well as NEH grants and a Wilkes Center seed grant. Honors include the Depoe Book Chapter Award in Environmental Communication (2017) and the University of Utah Community Engaged Teaching & Scholarship Award. With over 3,185 citations on Google Scholar, her work advances participatory democracy in environmental decision-making. Endres engages publicly through lectures, such as her Tanner Humanities Center talk on nuclear decolonization, and serves on the State of Utah's Hazardous Waste Control Board.