Faculty

At the 69th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), Professor Barbie Zelizer was awarded the 2019 B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award, one of ICA’s top honors.

The award recognizes outstanding scholars, teachers, and advisors who serve as role models in those capacities and who have had a major impact on the field of Communication. Recipients of the award must also have influenced the discipline through their former students, who themselves are important figures in Communication.

Currently an associate professor at Northeastern University, Jackson will join the Annenberg School faculty in July.

Associate Professor Sandra González-Bailón has been named a 2019-20 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.

Since 1954, this year-long program has been bringing scholars from across the United States and around the globe to live and conduct research together at Stanford.

How do political communication and other forms of information affect a civil society? How does political polarization impact information sharing, voting, and other parts of American democracy?

The Democracy & Information Group (DIG), a newly established working group led by Professor Yphtach Lelkes, aims to answer these questions. The group brings together graduate students interested in researching topics related to political communication, particularly how new media impact polarization and incivility.

This semester, the Annenberg School welcomes five scholars who will be teaching courses in our undergraduate program for the first time: Lik Sam Chan, Rayya El Zein, Eytan Gilboa, Daniel Grinberg, and Lee McGuigan.

President Amy Gutmann and Provost Wendell Pritchett are pleased to announce the appointment of Duncan Watts as the University of Pennsylvania’s twenty-third Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor, effective July 1, 2019.  

Among the most prestigious journals in the field of Communication, the Journal of Communication publishes the best Communication scholarship, including interdisciplinary research. Nine Annenberg alumni and one faculty member recently assumed editorial roles at the Journal of Communication, the flagship journal of the International Communication Association.

Despite the disruptions affecting journalism business models, shrinking newsroom resources, and growing local news deserts, Philadelphia residents say they are often overwhelmed with the amount of information that they get on a daily basis, according to a new report published today by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The question of how Donald Trump won the 2016 election looms over his presidency. Were the 78,000 voters who gave him an Electoral College victory affected by the Russian trolls and hackers? Trump has denied it, and so, too, has Vladimir Putin. Others cast the answer as unknowable.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s new book, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know, is the focus of an eight-page article in the New Yorker. The book focuses on whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in the 2016 election.