Stephanie Ricker Schulte

Stephanie Ricker Schulte, associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Communication, J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Over the years, Stephanie Schulte has worked closely with honors students at departmental, college, national and international levels. She served as the departmental honors advisor and has taught four honors courses, including the Honors College Signature Seminar “Internet.”

She also directed seven honors students on research topics ranging from an analysis of race in Instagram images posted by white missionaries in Africa to how disability operates historically in Disney films to an assessment of power dynamics embedded in internet infrastructures. Most of her students received high honors and research funding. Schulte has served on more than two dozen honors committees, and at the college level, she served on the Honors Council.

For seven years, Schulte interviewed finalists for Bodenhamer and Honors College fellowships and, along with her husband Bret, chaperoned incoming freshman Bodenhamer Fellows on the annual summer trip. On the national and international levels, she regularly serves as an interview panelist for fellowships such as Fulbright, Truman and Boren.

She served as the president of Phi Beta Kappa for two years and advised Lambda Pi Eta, the alpha chapter of the National Communication Association honors society. In large part for her work with honors students, Schulte received a Faculty Gold Medal (2015) and Outstanding Mentor Award (2015) from the Office of Nationally Competitive Awards, a Fulbright College Master Teacher Award (2019), and was a finalist for the Imhoff Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentorship (2017).