Robert T Oliver: Trailblazer in Intercultural Communication

Robert T. Oliver was a scholar extraordinaire and a towering figure in rhetoric and public address, but his contributions to the field of intercultural communication are less well known. For over sixty years, Dr. Oliver wrote prolifically about the impact of culture on rhetoric and communication. Although Dr. Oliver rarely used the words intercultural communication in his writings, which were voluminous, he contributed greatly to the development of the field. This essay focuses on Dr. Oliver’s four major contributions to intercultural communication: (1) Critiquing the Eurocentric bias of rhetoric/communication, (2) offering an Asiacentric alternative to the study of rhetoric/communication, (3) utilizing and intracultural perspective to frame rhetoric/communication research, and (4) envisioning international diplomacy as a site for examining rhetoric/communication.