Gerard A. Hauser

Gerard Alan Hauser (May 20, 1943 - ) is an award winning author, scholar, and professor emeritus of Communication and College Professor Emeritus of Distinction in Rhetoric at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a pioneer in the field of communication and rhetoric, his research focuses on the interaction between formal and vernacular rhetorics in the public sphere. He has authored several books and numerous articles on the subject and his writings have helped shaped the field of modern rhetoric.

Hauser was born in Buffalo, New York on May 20, 1943 to Albert Clement (a police officer) and Ann John Hauser. He went to Canisius College, where he received his B.A. in 1965. He then attended the University of Wisconsin Madison where he received both his M.A. in 1966 and his Ph.D. in 1970.

Hauser began teaching at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, as a professor of speech communication where he worked from 1969 to 1993 While at Penn State he was director of university scholars program from 1987 to 1993. In 1993 he accepted a position at the University of Colorado at Boulder as professor of communication and department chair. He has since retired and is now professor emeritus of Communication and College Professor Emeritus of Distinction in Rhetoric.

Hauser received the Marie Hochmuth Nicholas Book Award from the National Communication Association in 2000 for Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. He also received the George E. Yoos Distinguished Service Award from the Rhetoric Society of America in 2004 and was named distinguished scholar by National Communication Association in 2005 and named college professor of distinction 2007. The Rhetoric Society of America gives an award in his honor to graduate students at their biennial conference.

Hauser has written several books and articles on the topic of vernacular rhetoric. His first book was Introduction to Rhetorical Theory published in 1986 followed by Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres in 1999 followed by Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency in 2012. His most influential and oft cited work is Vernacular Voices.
In Vernacular Voices, Hauser focuses his work on the notion of public opinion and his belief in the concept of public opinion and how it is rendered in terms of rhetorical interactions rather than numerical aggregates. He seeks to reconfigure not merely the notion of public opinion but the very notion of the public sphere delineated by Jürgen Habermas. His critique of Habermas is respectful and novel. In the book, Hauser problematizes the notion of a single idealized public sphere populated by rational, disinterested individuals discussing common issues. Instead, Hauser imagines the public sphere as a web-like structure providing for interaction between numerous vernacular publics. This interaction, in turn, provides for both a common sense of the world and shared judgments. The overriding norm of consensus is abandoned in favor of common social referents. As Hauser puts it, "A public's emergence is not dependent on consensus but on the sharing of a common world, even when understood and lived differently by different segments of society."

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