Congratulations to Annenberg’s 2025 Ph.D. and M.A. Graduates
Twelve students earned their doctoral degrees, and eight students received M.A. degrees.
Yesterday, the Annenberg School for Communication held its annual doctoral graduation ceremony. The in-person celebration honored Annenberg's 2025 Ph.D. and M.A. recipients.
The ceremony recognized the following twelve students who earned their doctoral degrees in Communication, listed with their dissertation titles:
| Nicholas Dias | "The Underestimated Public: How Scholars Overlooked the Meaning in Citizens' Policy Opinions" |
|---|---|
| Staci L. Jones | “The Subaltern is Speaking: Southern Black Grandmothers and the Kitchen Scholar Framework for Disrupting Knowledge Hierarchies,” also known as "Knowed: Southern Black Grandmothers and the Kitchen Scholar Framework" by Staci L. Jones, Hattie Belle Jones, Luvenia McFadden, Lena Jenkins, and Mattie Jewel Lane |
| Tyler Leigh | "How Social Media Reduce Political Tolerance" |
| Azsaneé Truss | "Conspi(racism): Subversive Ideas in Black American Art & Media" |
| Xinyi Wang | "Investigating Environmental and Biological Factors that Shape our Curiosity for New Information" |
| Arlene Carolina Fernández | "Disrupting the Corner Store: On Bodegas, the Digital City, and the (Im)Possibilities of Refusal" |
| Mariela Morales | "Cuba's Digital Archipelago: transnational production and distribution of cultural alterity" |
| Danielle Clark | "Should Communication Interventions Promoting Health and Environmental Behavior Change Address Misinformation Beliefs? Implications from Two Nationally Representative Longitudinal Survey Studies and A Randomized Online Experiment" |
| Louisa Lincoln | "All the News That’s Fit to Fund: Journalism, Philanthropy, and Nonprofit News in the U.S." |
| Alex Tolkin | "Seeing Politics as a Sport: How Watching Sports Shapes Perceptions of Competition" |
| Shengchun Huang | "Illusions of Echo Chambers: (Mis)perceptions about Personalized News Environments and Political Consequences" |
| Baird Howland | "On the narrative construction of reality in political discourse: a theory, a method, and two empirical studies" |
Congratulations are also in order to the following Annenberg students who have earned their M.A. in Communication en route to the completion of their doctoral degrees:
- Marian Ada Ifeoma “Ify” Okpali
- Kallahan V. Brown
- E.V.S. Vishwanath
- Tejas Harad
- Kirsten Lydic
- Nidah Mohammed
- Yingchuan Qu
- Sara Reinis
In addition, Kate Okker-Edging was recognized with the James D. Woods Award for outstanding teaching by a graduate assistant.
