Kenneth Burke once noted that he has no particular field, unless it be Burkology. Nevertheless, those of us who do have field-specific professional homes have drawn upon Burke for our own disciplinary purposes. One gets a glimpse of how specific fields draw on Burke at the Triennial Burke conferences, whose featured speakers have included Donald McCloskey (now Deirdre) from Economics, Dell Hymes from Linguistics, Denis Donoghue from Literature, Joseph R. Gusfield from Sociology, and Celeste Condit from my own field of Communication Studies. KB Journal accepts papers from all of these fields and more, providing an interdisciplinary crossroads of Burke studies. In light of this aim, we have developed a new series, Burke in the Fields. The idea is to review how Burke has been used in various fields, both for the benefit of those working in those fields, and for those who have little idea of how Burke has been used by others.

The series kicks off in this issue with a review of “Burke and Communication Studies,” where Burke has had his broadest influence. The essay is authored by Barry Brummett, long-time Burke scholar and Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, and his colleague, Anna M. Young, Assistant Instructor of the same institution.

Clarke Rountree, Series Editor