Carnegie Mellon University

PhD students CP Moreau and Laura McCann, awarded fall 2018.

December 14, 2018

Two Rhetoric Ph.D. Students Bring Home Major Awards

By Angela Januzzi

This past fall two students in the Department of English’s Rhetoric Ph.D. program, Craig (CP) Moreau (2021) and Laura McCann (2024), were awarded major honors for their research and writing. 

Moreau received the internationally-recognized "2018 Best Paper for Proceedings" award from the Association of Business Communication for his paper “Discursive Diversity in the Entrepreneurial Pitch: Creating and Communicating a Marketplace Space (CAMS)”. Moreau’s  research  examines 10 pitches as transcribed from the high-stakes, reality TV show Shark Tank to argue that as part of a rhetorical goal to secure investment for their products, entrepreneurs deploy five discursive moves through a diverse range of linguistic resources — and in doing so Create a Marketplace Space (CAMS) for their products.

McCann was awarded an Andrew Mellon Fellowship for her forthcoming work, this year given to seven students from Carnegie Mellon University’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The support comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to transform humanities graduate research and increase learning through digital technology. McCann’s project will analyze information diffusion across media, collecting news articles with LexisNexis web scraping and Twitter’s application programming interface for two data events: the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the Equifax hack. Both spurred wide debates about digital privacy.

Previously, Moreau received an M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University, while McCann managed digital marketing for small businesses and academic departments. Before entering the Rhetoric Ph.D. program, both Moreau and McCann graduated with Masters degrees in Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of English.