Dr. Ross A. Eaman Receives Susanne K. Langer Award
Dr. Ross A. Eaman, an adjunct research professor and retired faculty member in the School of Journalism and Communication, was awarded the 2026 .
The award for “outstanding scholarship in the ecology of symbolic form“ was announced at the annual convention of the Media Ecology Association at the University of Winnipeg in June. Eaman authored Architecture as Communication: A Medium like No Other, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. He acknowledged the importance of Susanne Langer in his remarks, which were read at the ceremony:
“Taught by Alfred North Whitehead and influenced by Ernst Cassirer and Ludwig Wittgenstein among others, Langer went on to write Philosophy in a New Key (1942), which would have been a good candidate for Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in selling some 500,000 copies! It set the stage for a series of works further reconceptualizing the significance of signs and symbols and paving the way for my own treatment of architecture as a medium that communicates both symbolically and materially or in which, to be more philosophically precise, the symbolic and material are closely intertwined. It is, therefore, especially gratifying to have my work recognized as making a contribution in the tradition of Susanne K. Langer.”