Dr. Mary Marcel's Experience
Dr. Mary Marcel earned her doctorate in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Virginia. She is currently an Associate Professor of Information Design and Corporate Communication at Bentley University. She taught at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and at San Francisco State University before joining the faculty at Bentley University, where she has been a professor since 1992.
Dr. Marcel created and taught a long-running graduate course entitled Argumentation Strategies for Business, and an intensive Graduate Presentation Skills Workshop, which adapted Aristotelian approaches to persuasion for business communicators. Since 2014 she has also led executive Bentley education sessions on leadership communication. She is an award-winning public speaker, having achieved Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” for mastery milestone for public speaking preparation and practice by the age of 22. She has coached business case competition teams for the National Black MBA Case Competition, including two finalist teams, the KeyBank National Minority Case Competition, and the Hult International Case Competition. Her research with Dr. Nancy Ross Mahon of the Smeal College of Business at Penn State on how such competitions affect MBA school rankings was published in Business and Professional Communication Quarterly
Dr. Marcel has published research on communication apprehension across the career span, overturning common myths about stage fright and “trait-based anxiety” in the process. Her work, based on data collected from over 5000 adult and 1500 undergraduate respondents, demonstrated novel insights regarding the relationship between levels of presentation experience and communication apprehension. The results of her research have been published in Business and Communication Quarterly, the International Journal of Business Communication, and the Journal of Education for Business. Her consulting focuses on persuasion in its psychological, organizational, and leadership aspects. She also focuses on visual communication elements in the context of persuasion.