Faculty

Keith Berry

Professor 

CV

CONTACT INFORMATION

Email
Office: CIS 3046

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Berry is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. His research and teaching use a cultural approach to study relational communication, primarily the ways in which conversation partners creatively co-constitute, or jointly make and re-make, identities within social interaction and relationships, including the interactions and bonds that comprise communities. The ways through which cultural identities come to be, and matter, including those regarding vulnerable communities or groups, are of particular interest. His research uses a number of methodologies and orientations (e.g., autoethnography, ethnographic fieldwork and interviewing, queer theory) and the assumptions and practices of hermeneutic phenomenology underlie all of his work. Much of Dr. Berry’s research has investigated three applied communication contexts: (1) youth bullying (2) LGBTQ+ cultures and identities; and (3) reflexivity in autoethnography and related research practices.

He is the co-author (with Joyce L. Hocker and William W. Wilmot) of Interpersonal Conflict, 11th ed. (McGraw Hill, 2022), the co-author (with Catherine M. Gillotti and Tony E. Adams) of Living Sexuality: Stories of LGBTQ Identities, Relationships, and Desires (Brill/Sense, 2020) and the solo-author of Bullied: Tales of Torment, Identity, and Youth (Routledge, 2016). Bullied has received several honors including the 2016 Best Book Award by the Ethnography Division of the National Communication Association (NCA), the 2017 Goodall/Trujillo It’s a Way of Life Award by the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the 2017 Innovator Award from the Central States Communication Association’s Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity Caucus.

His other publications can be found in academic journals including Qualitative Inquiry, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Communication Education, and International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and in books such as the Cambridge Handbook of Identity, the Handbook of Autoethnography, and The Routledge Handbook of Communication and Bullying.  

Dr. Berry is a past Co-Chair of NCA’s Anti-Bullying Task Force and past Chair of NCA’s Ethnography Division. He most recently served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication.

RESEARCH AREAS

Relational Communication, Culture, Identity, Bullying, LGBTQ, Autoethnography, Reflexivity

RESEARCH clusters

Health Communication; Interpersonal and Relational Communication; Media, Culture, and Performance