Books by Theodore F. Sheckels

This book analyzes the thiry-six political party conventions since 1948 as rhetorical entities with goals often epideictic, constitutive, and even deliberative. Crucial in meeting (and sometimes not) these goals are speeches, demonstrations, and off-camera discussions at each convention.

Maryland Politics and Political Communication, 1950-2005 is not a survey of all that occurred between 1950 and 2005. Rather, this book focuses on a set of interesting political events in which communication is a very important variable. These events, be they elections or episodes of governance, are also_arguably_the most dramatic ones during the period. It begins with an examination of George Wallace's 1964 and 1972 campaigns in the state's Democratic presidential primary, considers William Donald Schaefer's flamboyant communication strategies as Baltimore mayor and the vicious 1986 U.S. Senate campaign between Democrat Barbara Mikulski and Linda Chavez, and runs through the 2002 gubernatorial race between Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Robert L. Ehrlich. Sheckels highlights the similarities and differences between political communication at state and national levels and looks forward to questions and scenarios that may emerge in future elections.

Suggesting that politics and power are at the center of Margaret Atwood's fiction, the author examines Atwood's novels from "The Edible Woman" to "The Year of the Flood". He focuses on how the empowered act towards those who are constrained within the political, economic and social institutions that facilitate power dynamics.

In Gender and the American Presidency: Nine Presidential Women and the Barriers They Faced, Theodore F. Sheckels, Nichola D. Gutgold, and Diana Bartelli Carlin invite the audience to consider women qualified enough to be president and explores reasons why they have been dismissed as presidential contenders. This analysis profiles key presidential contenders including Barbara Mikulski, Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Kassebaum, Kathleen Sebelius, Christine Gregoire, Linda Lingle, Elizabeth Dole, Dianne Feinstein, and Olympia Snowe. Gender barriers, media coverage, communication style, geography, and other factors are examined to determine why these seemingly qualified, powerful politicos failed to win the White House.

This study argues that post-1970 Australian film is best described not as exhibiting phenomenal variety but as focused on a conception of heroism characterized by the love of freedom, the resentment of authority, and attachment to the land, along with anti-intellectualism, fatalism, and sexism.

This perspective on Congressional debating, derived from the theoretical work of Mikhail Bakhtin, argues against several often unvoiced assumptions: that such debating is tedious and inconsequential; that debates are inherently bipolar; and that they are "finalizable".