Pennsylvania State University

Studies broadband policy, the digital divide, and rural connectivity in the United States using critical, qualitative methods and community-based broadband stories.

Studies nonprofit organizational communication, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and volunteerism from a public relations perspective.

Studies the persuasive and psychological effects of advertising, branded content, and corporate communication on information processing and attitudes.

Studies the production and effects of persuasive messages, including the role of emotion in persuasion and interpersonal influence, often applied to public health.

Theorizes democracy as a communal practice of care, deliberation, and mindfulness, offering rhetorical and philosophical accounts of civic life.

Studies advice and social support in interpersonal and health contexts, developing advice response theory and examining doctor-parent and patient decision conversations.

Studies intersectional rhetorical racialization, including Chicana feminism, whiteness, masculinity, and border and immigration rhetorics, through critical rhetorical analysis.

Studies political deliberation and group decision making, evaluating reforms like the Citizens' Initiative Review and juries and designing online deliberation platforms.

Studies official and grassroots memory practices as political rhetoric and civic engagement, including how Soviet terror is remembered in Russia and former USSR states.

Studies supportive communication and computer-mediated communication, examining how messages and channel affordances shape coping outcomes.

Studies telecommunications policy and media economics, especially universal broadband access, disability, and comparative information policy in China and India.

Studies how popular media and communication technologies construct identity and cultural ideology, using historical and critical analysis of sound, film, and media culture.

Critically analyzes advertising, commercialization, and popular culture, including superhero films and comics, from a political economy of media perspective.

Works at the intersection of emerging technology and public policy, including broadband, net neutrality, spectrum, privacy, and building community internet infrastructure.

Leads the college as dean, with a background spanning journalism, diplomacy, and policy analysis; the profile does not describe a specific research program.

Studies the emotional and cognitive effects of media, audience enjoyment and positive media psychology, and how racial portrayals shape viewers' attitudes.

Studies how politics, economics, and culture shape media systems, focusing on media in African transitional societies and decolonization.

Studies public relations ethics, CSR communication, and corporate social advocacy, and the psychological factors shaping how publics process and engage with messages.

Develops media ethics theory drawing on moral psychology and virtue, examining newsroom and PR practice and moral questions raised by AI design and use.

Studies media law and the regulation of emerging technologies, focusing on freedom of expression, access to information, government transparency, and social media regulation.

Studies media effects and perceptions of media, including third-person perception, news credibility, and enjoyment and difficulty in video games.

Studies how ads, message frames, emotions, and narratives affect information processing, attitudes, and risk perceptions, using experiments and surveys.

Studies how message features and audience characteristics shape persuasive health communication, message processing, and resistance to persuasion.

Studies social influence, including how prejudice diffuses into stigma and how social power and network topology shape persuasion, and designs and evaluates health campaigns.

Studies communication in personal relationships, such as support and conflict, and develops relational turbulence theory to explain relationship transitions and well-being.

Studies political and presidential rhetoric, American public address, and American Indian politics through rhetorical criticism.

Studies the psychology of human-computer interaction and social effects of AI, chatbots, and digital media, theorizing and testing them through experiments and computational methods.

Studies rhetorical theory and public controversies over collective memory, witnessing, and forgetting, as well as campus misinformation and free speech.

Studies how social media, algorithms, and AI affect democracy and political life using survey, experimental, and computational methods.

Studies the science of science communication, examining how audience segments make meaning of science and environmental messages and why campaigns fail.

Studies environmental rhetoric and the environmental humanities, including ecological grief, more-than-human rhetorics, and Hannah Arendt's environmental thought.

Studies media management and platform business, including how audiences adopt technologies, choose streaming content, and respond to AI recommendation algorithms and companions.

Conducts applied strategic communication research on international political advertising, health and science communication, and communication with refugees.

Studies social influence on environmental and climate change attitudes, examining ideology, group and network dynamics, and persuasive messages that bridge divides.

Creates documentary films and multimedia journalism about ordinary people turned changemakers, with attention to filmmaking ethics and human rights education.

Studies histories and theories of rhetoric, publics, public memory, sound, and deliberation, including rhetoric and violence in public education and broadcast archives.

Writes on journalism ethics, literary journalism, and internet folklore, interpreting news practices and online legends through essays and textual analysis.

Writes and directs documentary and hybrid fiction films exploring gender, class, faith, and autobiographical storytelling, including domestic sex trafficking.

Studies stewardship and dialogic communication in nonprofit-donor relationships, plus corporate social responsibility and athlete advocacy in sports public relations.

Studies how copyright shapes free speech and cultural production, along with First Amendment and policy issues affecting the internet and telecommunications.

Studies the history and theory of ancient Mediterranean rhetoric and its reception, including classical ideals in the early age of automation and cybernetics.

Examines how media technologies, the state, commerce, and gender shape culture and identity transnationally, focusing on digital feminism in Chinese societies.

Studies sports journalism and sports broadcasting in national and international contexts, including the Olympics, sports diplomacy, and media and identity.

Studies public relations for social change, amplifying marginalized voices on issues like gender-based violence through activism, crisis communication, and qualitative methods.

Studies organizational behavior in groups and teams, quantitatively testing how leadership, cohesion, and group dynamics affect performance.

Studies global media political economy and postsocialist media history, tracing how media liberalization fueled right-wing populism in Bulgaria via archives and interviews.

Studies environmental and science journalism, especially news coverage of environmental challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean, and risk messaging on social media.

Studies relationships among media, labor, and social justice from feminist and critical cultural perspectives, including new media work, the gig economy, and activism.

Studies how perceived authenticity shapes digital advertising effectiveness, consumer attitudes, and health outcomes amid digitally manipulated and misleading media content.

Studies how emotion and efficacy shape audience responses to environmental, health, and science messages, including climate change and anti-tobacco communication.

Studies the rhetoric of U.S. education policy, analyzing how education debates since Reconstruction shape national belonging and political exclusion.

Bridges rhetoric, archives, and gender and sexuality studies, recovering queer histories of romantic friendship and rhetorical education through archival research.

Studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century American political rhetoric, congressional debate, and the Black Freedom Struggle, focusing on race, racism, and public memory.

Makes independent feature documentaries, including work on Indigenous subjects and cruise tourism, as creative practice in documentary filmmaking.

Studies how narratives and entertainment media shape audience emotions, attitudes, well-being, and prosocial responses, including restorative and moral storytelling.

Studies how message characteristics and a shifting media landscape shape consumer responses to digital advertising and persuasion, including perceived polling effects.

Examines technoscience, surveillance, and security infrastructures through feminist, postcolonial, and STS theory, including drone warfare, predictive policing, and cybernetics.

Writes, directs, and produces narrative films and shorts, including work set in Latin America on issues such as rapid urbanization.

Studies ethical strategic communication and public relations, including crisis and risk communication, sociopolitical advocacy, and stakeholder dynamics.

Studies supportive communication across face-to-face and mediated channels, examining how affordances, expectations, and verbal and nonverbal cues shape support outcomes.

Studies how sibling and parent communication shapes adolescents' and emerging adults' well-being and health, using advanced quantitative and mixed methods with family data.