Adetobi Moses (Ph.D. ‘26) Named Center on Digital Culture and Society Postdoctoral Fellow
During the next year, she will explore how narratives and cultural memory intersect with political realities, particularly during global crises.
The Center on Digital Culture and Society (CDCS) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania has announced that recent Annenberg doctoral graduate Adetobi Moses (Ph.D. ‘26) will be the newest CDCS postdoctoral fellow.
Her research explores how stories and cultural memory shape how people understand politics, particularly during global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. She also studies how the media and globalization inform transnational spaces, identities, cultures, and artistic practices.
“I am thrilled that Adetobi will join CDCS as our newest postdoctoral fellow,” says CDCS Director Guobin Yang, the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology. “Her work examining COVID-19 communication will further our effort to build a public culture of pandemic archiving, remembering, and storytelling.”
Moses’s work has been published in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Media Theory, Public Culture, the International Journal of Communication, and presented at the annual conferences of the National Communication Association and the Association of Internet Researchers, among others.
In 2024, she was awarded a Penn Global Dissertation Grant to examine the narratives and counternarratives of the COVID-19 pandemic in two cities: Philadelphia in the U.S. and Accra in Ghana. Her dissertation — “Diseased Memories, Spaces, and Bodies: Postcolonial Tensions in the Communication of the COVID-19 Pandemic” — reflected that research, she says, looking at “the historical and postcolonial tensions within global mediatizations of the COVID-19 pandemic and how these tensions abetted alternative, skewed narratives of the COVID-19 virus, online and offline, that impeded health communication initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa.”
As a postdoctoral fellow, Moses plans to continue studying the narrative constructions of crises across a wide range of news, digital, print, and oral media. “I am particularly interested in the ways globally circulated crisis narratives affect everyday people and subaltern communities,” she says.
