Religious Communication Association names Steven Beebe scholar of the year

Steven A. Beebe, Texas State University System Regents' Professor and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Texas State University, has been named Scholar of the Year by the Religious Communication Association (RCA).

Beebe was chosen by the RCA’s executive council in recognition of his consistent and significant contribution to the communication discipline and his fresh and relevant work at the intersection of communication and religion.

Beebe was presented the award Nov. 16 in New Orleans. During the RCA awards banquet, Beebe delivered the evening's keynote address on his book, C.S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication.

Beebe served as chair of the Department of Communication Studies for 28 years and concurrently as associate dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication for 25 years. Prior to joining the faculty at Texas State he was a tenured member of the communication faculty at the University of Miami for 10 years. He made international headlines when conducting research at Oxford University when he discovered an unpublished manuscript written by C.S. Lewis that was the partial opening chapter of a book that was to be co-authored with J.R.R. Tolkien called Language and Human Nature. In 2016 and 2019 he also discovered unknown and unpublished poems by Lewis in the Oxford University Bodleian Library.