Elissa Foster

Elissa Foster, PhD is a tenured Professor and Faculty Fellow of the DePaul Humanities Center (2022-2024), an award that supported the completion of her first novel. She investigates the relationship between communication and health, especially difficult conversations at the beginning and at the end of life and in clinical environments. She has published over thirty academic articles, a dozen book chapters and one book, Communicating at the End of Life (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007). She is invested in the preservation of the “whole person” in institutional contexts including academia. She believes that narrative inquiry is essential to her calling as a scholar, and that the greatest gift she give to her students is confidence in their ability to make a better world.

Select Publications

Books

• "Communicating at the End of Life: Finding Magic in the Mundane" (2017)

Book Chapters

• "My eyes cry without me: Illusions of choice and control in the transition to motherhood." In S. Hayden and L. O’Brien Hallstein (Eds.) Contemplating maternity: Discourses of Choice and Control (pp. 139-158). Lanham, MA: Lexington Press.
• Foster, E. (2016). Communicating through challenging illness. In P. Geist-Martin, B. Sharf, & J. Yamasaki (eds.), Storied health and illness: Communicating personal, cultural, and political complexities (2nd ed.) (pp. 221-246). Waveland Press.
• DuPré, A., & Foster, E. (2016). Transactional communication. In Wittenberg-Lyles, E., Ferrell, B., Goldsmith, J., Smith, T., Ragan, S., Glajchen, M., & Handzo, G. (Eds.), Textbook of palliative care communication (pp. 14 – 21). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Foster, E., & McGivern, J. (2014). A story we can live with: The role of the sonographer in the diagnosis of fetal demise. In R. Silverman & J. Baglia (Eds.), Communicating pregnancy loss: Narrative as a method for change (pp. 75-87). New York: Peter Lang.
• Foster, E., & Cohen-Katz, J. (2011). Caring for the family: Teaching systems and cycles in a family medicine residency program. In M. Miller-Day (Ed.) Going through this together: Family communication, connection, and health transitions (pp. 323-348). New York: Peter Lang.

Journals

• "Academic labor in the age of anxiety: Autoethnography matters" (2017). Cultural Studies <> Critical Methodologies, 17, 320-326.
• "Physicians’ stories: Autoethnography, presence, and rhizomatic inquiry" (2014). International Review of Qualitative Research, 7, 290-301.
• "Values and the transformation of medical education: The promise of autoethnographic research" (2013). Journal of Medicine and the Person, 11, 19-23.
• "Commitment, communication, and contending with heteronormativity: An invitation to greater reflexivity in interpersonal research" (2008). Southern Communication Journal, 73, 84-101.
• "Desiring dialectical discourse: A feminist ponders the transition to motherhood" (2005). Women’s Studies in Communication, 28, 57-83.
• Performing the “Really Real:” Cultural criticism, representation, and commodification in The Laramie Project (with Jay Baglia, 2005). Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 19(2), 127-145.
• "Storm tracking: Scenes of marital disintegration" (2002). Qualitative Inquiry, 8, 804-819.
• "Lessons we learned: Stories of volunteer-patient communication in hospice" (2002). Journal of Aging and Identity, 7, 245-256.

Media