Our Graduate Program

We are an international, interdisciplinary, boundary-spanning graduate program with a vision of social justice.

The emergence of Communication as a multifaceted social science discipline is connected with both the search for new perspectives on contemporary problems and the profusion of technologies of communication. Our graduate program approaches communication as the primary social process through which social realities are constituted, maintained, and changed. Those varied processes and contexts constitute the core of our work, with opportunities to pursue communication theory and research in the following areas:

• Film Studies
• Media Effects and Popular Culture
• Media, Technology, and Society
• Rhetoric and Performance Studies
• Social Interaction and Culture

Our faculty offers a wide-variety of methodological expertises, some resolutely social scientific, others rooted in the humanities, including but not limited to:

• Critical text analysis
• Performance studies
• Ethnography
• Survey/Experimental designs
• Content analysis
• Computational methods

Our doctoral program is known for:

• R1-level research productivity
• Interdisciplinary, boundary-spanning scholarship: our department is represented by scholars in humanities and social science, bringing in a diverse set of methodological knowledge in critical studies, ethnography, survey/experimental design, content analysis, and computational methods
• Social justice perspective that recognizes that links between theory and practice, believing that knowledge matters outside of the academy
• Comparative and international focus with many of our faculty being born and raised outside of the U.S. context.

Our graduate student body is known for:

• diverse and international: Currently, We have 34 international and 25 domestic students. Fourteen of the international students come from East Asia, particularly South Korea and China. The rest represent 14 other countries from Latin America, North America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South Asia. We also have a graduate student organization Scholars of Color in Communication (SCC) that serves and supports graduate students, faculty, and staff of color in the Department including international scholars who do not identify with the racial majority in the United States.
• A strong record of job placement: Based on our recent alumni survey,  The majority of our PhD graduates (70%) are employed at universities in the U.S. and abroad. Of these (60%) have secured tenure track academic appointments in the U.S. (43%) and abroad (17%), at institutions ranging from Simon Fraser, Vanderbilt, Tecnologico de Monterrey, and Colorado-Boulder, to private colleges (Emerson, Bentley, Wooster, Hampshire, Boston) and smaller state (Framingham, Western Washington) and private universities (Santa Clara,  Sacred Heart) or community colleges (Bunker Hill, Northern Virginia, Berkshire).
• a global alumni network: our alumni can be found teaching, in research posts, and in other jobs across the United States and around the world. Check out this interactive Graduate Alumni Map to see where they are making an impact