Cheyenne Zaremba
I am a rhetorician and scholar of death, dying, and grief. My research sits at the intersection of embodied experience and culturally informed discourse about death and dying in an attempt to understand the distance between what we say and believe about death and grief and what we actually do and feel at end-of-life.
My recent scholarship has focused on the role that U.S. funerals play in mediating disenfranchised grief--grief that is felt but not expressed for any number of social, cultural, or political reasons. I have also researched the spatial and temporal nature of rural American cemeteries as performers and the visuality of death in the context of postmortem photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century in the context of contemporary representations of death and racial violence.
I earned my Bachelor's (Roberts Wesleyan College, 2019) and Master's (Villanova University, 2021) in Communication and completed by PhD (Penn State, 2026) in Rhetoric with a graduate minor in Visual Studies. I am also certified in Communication and Critical/Culture Studies (Villanova University, 2021), Grief Support Specialization (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 2023), Ethical Pedagogy (Penn State, 2024), and I am a trained death doula (INELDA, 2025).
I am a founding member of the Death & Dying Division of the National Communication Association.
Department of Communication Arts & Sciences, Penn State University, State College, PA
Publications
As a junior scholar, I am actively pursuing publication for several of my manuscripts. My debut publication, "A Picture of a Good Death: Race, Violence, and Postmortem Photography," was featured in a special issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research called Who is a Good Death For?
If you cannot gain access to any of my publications, email me. I would be happy to provide a copy for reference.
Intellectual Activity
In addition to pursuing publication, I am an active participant in several conferences, most prominently:
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National Communication Association
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Eastern Communication Association
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Rhetoric Society of America
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International Death, Grief, and Bereavement Conference
You can find some of my highlighted presentations on my scholarship page. I am more than happy to share manuscripts used for presentation for reference or citation via email.
I am also a founding member of Death Scholars, an interdisciplinary collective of communication-adjacent scholars of death and dying, and the Death & Dying Division at NCA.
