Programs › Athens, GA
Studies telenovelas, Turkish dramas, and the ties between melodrama, culture, and society, especially in Venezuela, through critical cultural studies and qualitative methods.
Studies how virtual reality, video games, social media, and virtual agents shape attitudes and behaviors in health, consumer, conservation, and education contexts.
Studies how communication in close and family relationships relates to body image, disordered eating, intergenerational mental health, and intergroup attitudes such as sexism and weightism.
Theorizes rhetorical agency and social change by bringing rhetorical criticism into dialogue with continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and visual and public memory studies.
Studies science and risk communication, tracking media and social media coverage of issues like nanotechnology, food safety, and climate change and how values shape public opinion.
Focuses on freedom of information and press access, drawing on a journalism career and leadership of the National Freedom of Information Coalition.
Studies the history, theory, and practice of alternative media and democratic communication, developing historicizing critiques for the digital era.
Studies strategic health communication campaigns and how communication technologies affect audience engagement and health outcomes, emphasizing message testing and health disparities.
Develops rhetorical and critical theory of science and medicine, examining how genetics, epigenetics, and biopolitics produce meanings of race, gender, and difference under capitalism.
Applies network analysis to social media to study political talk, information flow, news, and international communication, identifying hubs and information-source patterns.
Develops crisis and risk communication theory, examining the role of emotions and social media in organizational crises, disasters, and public health emergencies.
Studies television, political satire, and parody, examining how entertainment television shapes popular politics and civic engagement.
Works in transnational cultural studies on global media, television, and Bollywood, and now pursues autoethnographic and narrative nonfiction writing.
Studies advertising and branding in digitally networked, AI-driven environments, developing the Connectism framework linking individual user experience to collective brand experience.
Studies celebrity, screenwriting, autobiography, and critical tourism through cultural studies, critical theory, and new ethnography, while producing film and television.
Writes and produces film, television, and animated feature screenplays as a creative practitioner and teaches screenwriting.
Studies public relations leadership and leadership development, diversity in PR leadership, PR measurement, reputation management, and global communication.
Studies health and risk communication, including immunization campaigns, health messaging, news media, and provider-patient communication, informed by long CDC experience.
Studies media law and policy, examining how technological and political forces reshape press and free expression law, including international and comparative work on media freedom.
Studies international and cross-cultural journalism, news trust and credibility across countries, and the cognitive and emotional effects of digital and immersive news content.
Studies emerging and social media, brand activism, and power, drawing on digital marketing practice to evaluate creative brand strategies.
Studies women's agency, belonging, transnationalism, and social movements such as the Greenham Common peace camp through feminist rhetorical criticism and public address.
Studies propaganda, militainment, and the visual culture of war and state violence through critical rhetorical and media analysis and documentary filmmaking.
Studies Arctic and Nordic cinema, media, and culture, including media sovereignty and the climate crisis in new Arctic cinemas, through humanistic film and cultural analysis.
Examines the social-psychological processes that shape how people engage with scientific evidence in public health, environmental risk, and science communication.
Runs experiments with eye-tracking and response-time measures to study how digital media design, interactivity, and navigability affect attention, cognition, and recall.
Studies humor effects and schema incongruity processing in advertising, plus health, environmental, and digital advertising, also using network and sentiment analysis.
Studies news production and how journalists respond to change, including newsroom unionization, attacks on the press, and local news deserts in the rural U.S. and Germany, using qualitative methods.
Studies television and media industries, including industry responses to Black Lives Matter and AI's role in global media flows, through interviews with media professionals and textual analysis.
Studies corporate communication, including corporate social responsibility and advocacy, startup and entrepreneurial PR, AI in public relations, and prosocial communication.
Studies historical and contemporary digital culture, including magical thinking about technology, 1990s cyberculture, women's video game play, and internet folklore like Slender Man.
Runs experiments on whether audiences detect politicians and spokespersons dodging questions and deceiving in media interviews, including during corporate crises.
Extends persuasion and information-processing theories to how consumers recognize covert advertising such as native ads, influencer ads, and advergames, with regulatory implications.
Writes and develops film and television screenplays as a creative practitioner, with teaching centered on screenwriting.
Studies photojournalism and visual communication, including how news images are made, selected, and interpreted, and how solutions journalism is conceptualized and practiced.
Studies content creators, influencers, and social media platforms, examining pop culture, creator labor, virality and scandal, and animal images in digital life.
Writes and directs feature films, streaming television movies, and documentaries as a screenwriter, director, and novelist.
Designs and evaluates culturally targeted, community-engaged interventions to reduce health disparities, focusing on women's sexual and reproductive health and clinical trial communication.
Examines how to communicate complex and uncertain scientific evidence on health, genetics, vaccines, and climate to diverse publics, using quantitative message-effects research.
Uses psychophysiological and neuroscience methods to study cognitive and emotional processing of mediated representations of identity and prosocial health messaging.
Studies early U.S. public address on race, slavery, and law, including the African colonization movement and Frederick Douglass, through historical rhetorical criticism.
Studies the intersection of education, media, policy, and sport, focusing on college athletics policy, women's sports and Title IX, and how sports media work with sources.
Produces and directs documentary films and live documentary performances that screen at international festivals and museums.
Studies language attitudes toward non-U.S. accents and how African immigrants negotiate racial identity in the U.S., using quantitative and qualitative methods.
Studies rhetorical theory and historiography of empire and colonialism, political rhetoric, and social movements, including semicolonial rhetoric, through historical rhetorical analysis.
Studies climate justice advocacy and transnational feminist and anti-colonial rhetorics, using critical rhetorical field methods at UN climate (UNFCCC) conferences.
Studies how digital media fuel intergroup hate and distrust, examining online group communication, mediated intergroup contact, and interventions to reduce polarization.
Studies how complex and uncertain health, risk, and science information is communicated to and processed by different audiences, using mixed methods.
Studies the psychological effects of AI systems, social media, mobile devices, and VR on persuasion, privacy, misinformation susceptibility, and trust using experimental and computational methods.
Uses critical and intergroup theories to study how family communication, including ethnic-racial socialization, shapes marginalized families and health disparities for women of color.
Creates documentary and narrative films exploring vulnerability and inspiration, often involving scientific research and fantastical imagery, with attention to sustainable production.
Studies global media and digital platforms, including how streaming services reshape Japanese anime production and U.S. consumption and how marginalized communities build belonging online.
Studies corporate communication and stakeholder relationships, including CSR and advocacy, crisis-induced organizational change, misinformation sharing on social media, and AI in marketing.
Uses qualitative and critical rhetorical methods to study public relations history, the Civil Rights Movement, public memory, higher education PR, and crisis communication.
Studies how language and culture shape health messages, illness experiences, and patient-provider and family health interactions, using mixed methods to address health literacy and disparities.
Uses qualitative methods to study race and media, especially the experiences of Black and underrepresented journalists, social justice coverage, and racialized mis/disinformation.
Studies internal and leadership communication, employee engagement, and organization-stakeholder relationships in contemporary workplaces.