Rate My Professor Laura Bruns

Laura Bruns is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from Wayne State University in January 2022. Her dissertation, 'Perimortem Rhetoric: A Rhetoric of Death and Dying,' explores hospice website discourses on end-of-life services. It proposes perimortem rhetoric (PMR), a rhetoric that symbolically implicates death without explicitly stating it, extending Segal’s rhetoric of dying. Using Foucault’s biopolitics and Mbembe’s necropolitics for discursive analysis and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s presence and absence for visual analysis, the study examined 481 pages of text and 352 images from hospice sites. Five textual PMR themes and three visual themes emerged, showing how hospices commercialize services by focusing on medical care and positive imagery, potentially misaligning expectations with the reality of dying.

Before FAU, Bruns was a Lecturer in the College of Communications and Fine Arts at Bradley University from August 2010 to May 2019, and previously at Illinois State University from August 2008 to May 2010 and the College of Charleston. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the College of Charleston (2008). Her research interests encompass rhetoric, death and dying, rhetorical autoethnography, feminist criticism, and pedagogy, with her Google Scholar profile showing 17 citations. Publications include 'Amy’s Army: An Evolution of Support and Grief in a Private Facebook Community' (2022), 'The Rhetorical Goddess: A Feminist Perspective on Women in Magic' (2014), and a co-authored piece on 'Death education, communication, and happiness' (2025). Bruns serves as Immediate Past Chair of the National Communication Association’s Death and Dying Division. At FAU, she teaches courses such as SPC 3542 Rhetorical Theories and supervises graduate work, including dissertation committees.