Elon will hold a brief ceremony at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 20, in front of the McEwen Communications building to remember Melody van Lidth de Jeude.
The university has installed a memorial bench in front of McEwen, and the bench dedication will include words from her husband and a student from one of her classes.
Van Lidth de Jeude, an instructor in the School of Communications who died May 27, 2011, following a brief illness, taught public speaking to hundreds of Elon students since her arrival on campus four years ago. She was a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Organizational Communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and had taught at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the Fuqua School of Business at Duke and Wake Forest University, as well as Heinrich Heine Universitat.
She earned her Master’s degree at Southern Illinois University, where she received the Robert B. Hawkins Award for Excellence in Speech Communication Scholarship. Since 2004, she has taught an online course for the Institüt für Verbundstudium in Mönchengladbach, Germany. In May 2006, she coauthored a paper presented at the University of Tampere.
In addition to Public Speaking courses, she also taught Persuasion and The Process of Communication in the School of Communications.