Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp is professor of Communication Studies at Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Virginia.  She received her bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Washington. 
Her research interests include dissent and social movements, public memory in planned and spontaneous memorials, visual rhetoric, rhetoric of science, and British and American public address. The unifying theme in much of Jorgensen-Earp’s work has been violence, whether directed toward self or others, and its rhetorical impact.  This interest has led her to long-term study of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant branch of the British women’s suffrage movement. She is interested both in violence as a rhetorical tool and in the rhetorical justification for, and response to, the use of violence. 
Her work has appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Western Journal of Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, and elsewhere.  She is the author of The Transfiguring Sword: The Just War of the Women’s Social and Political Union and editor of Speeches and Trials of the Militant Suffragettes.  Her most recent book is In the Wake of Violence: Image and Social Reform, published in 2008 by Michigan State University Press.  She is currently finishing work on a study of resistance during the German Occupation of Guernsey, one of the British Channel Islands, in World War II. She believes strongly in undergraduate scholarship and thoroughly enjoys mentoring student research. In 2001, she was named Virginia Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.