Marilyn DeLaure

Marilyn DeLaure is a professor of Environmental Studies and affiliate faculty of Advertising. She teaches courses on environmental communication, social movements, and consumer culture. Her research investigates how people effect social change, focusing especially on embodied performance and public memory. She has published essays on environmental activism, anti-consumption tactics, and civil rights rhetoric, and is co-editor of Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU Press). She is also a producer of the award-winning documentary film MOTHERLOAD about the cargo bicycling movement.

• Environmental rhetoric
• Youth climate movement
• Culture jamming
• Civil rights and public memory

• Co-Director, Tracy Seeley Center for Teaching Excellence (2020-2024)
• Faculty Co-Director, USF101 (2014-2021)

• University of Iowa, PhD in Rhetorical Studies, 1999
• Drake University, BA in Speech Communication, 1993

• Assistant Professor in Communication Studies, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (2003-2006)
• Assistant Professor in Communication Arts, Allegheny College (1999-2003)

• USF Faculty Association Distinguished Teaching Award, 2018
• USF College of Arts and Sciences Service Award, 2018

• “Discourse Design: The Art of Rhetoric and the Science of Persuasion.” Revised and expanded essay in Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design, 2d edition. Edited by Rachel Beth Egenhoefer. London: Routledge, 2024.
• “The Evolution of Voluntary Simplicity: From Soulful Search for Meaning to Extreme Lifestyle Experiments.” Co-authored with Stephen Zavestoski. In Anti-Consumption: Exploring the Opposition to Consumer Culture, edited by Michael S.W. Lee and Helene Cherrier. New York: Routledge, 2023.
• “Performing Loss: Sonic Rhetoric in Maya Lin’s What is Missing?” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 16.1 (2020): 1-32.
• Editor (with Moritz Fink) and Author: Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance. NYU Press, 2017.
• DeLaure, Marilyn. “Environmental Comedy: No Impact Man and the Performance of Green Identity.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 5.4 (December 2011): 447-66.