Edward Schiappa

Anthony Edward Schiappa, Jr. is an American scholar of communication and rhetoric, currently Professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he holds the John E. Burchard Chair of Humanities; from 2013 to 2019, he also served as the program's Head.

[2] His younger daughter, Lauren Murray, completed an MA in Comparative Culture at International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, in 2023.

Schiappa argues that the word cannot be found in a surviving text that predates Plato's Gorgias from the early 4th century BCE.

In his 2022 book The Transgender Exigency: Defining Sex & Gender in the 21st Century, Schiappa examines the key sites of definitional debate including schools, bathrooms, the military, sports, prisons, and feminism, drawing attention to the political, practical, and ethical dimensions of the act of defining sex and gender.

In it, Schiappa argues that scholars interested in the “effects” of popular media or who wish to determine a text's cultural meaning would develop stronger analyses if they would engage in audience research.

The theory has been cited widely and won the National Communication Association's 2016 Woolbert Award as work "that has stood the test of time and has become a stimulus for new conceptualizations of communication phenomena.”[5] Schiappa has utilized a diverse set of methods in his work, including translation of ancient Greek, scansion of Greek prose, formalization of arguments, one-shot surveys, and controlled lab experiments involving pre/post-tests and various statistical analyses.