Graduate Program

Through ethnographic interviews and archival research, she considers questions like: What counts as journalism and what doesn’t? Why are certain types of storytelling censored and others aren’t? Why do people choose to tell the stories they tell?

Leigh is a third-year doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a joint Ph.D. in Communication and Political Science. His research interests are focused on understanding how people think and talk about politics, and how their social contexts factor in.

The Fall 2020 semester is an unusual one, given that all Annenberg School courses are being offered virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Annenberg School is nonetheless pleased to (virtually) welcome 12 new Ph.D. students.

Our virtual graduation honored eight students who have earned their doctoral degrees in Communication, 17 students who earned their M.A. degrees, and the 2020 Woods Award winner.

How can experts best communicate their research to both the general public and policymakers? What strategies create the most trust in scientific and medical evidence, and what techniques best present the information in ways that those outside the scientific community can understand?

This semester, the Annenberg School is pleased to welcome 11 Ph.D. students, who bring with them professional accomplishments, life experience, and research portfolios — and interesting hobbies too.

A forthcoming study — authored by Annenberg School for Communication alumni Elena Maris (Ph.D. ’18) and Timothy Libert (Ph.D. ’17) and doctoral candidate Jennifer R. Henrichsen — analyzed over 22,000 pornography websites and found that 93% of them were sending user data to at least one third party.

Doctoral Students Lauren Bridges and Leeann Siegel received the James D. Woods Award at the 2019 Annenberg Graduation Ceremony. Given in memory of Annenberg graduate student James D. Woods, the award is granted to an outstanding graduate teaching assistant.

Bridges, a second year Ph.D. student, was nominated for Professor Guobin Yang's undergraduate course COMM 203: Media, Culture & Society in Contemporary China.

On Monday, May 20, the Annenberg School for Communication held its annual graduation ceremony for doctoral students. The celebration honored 15 graduate students who have earned or will soon earn their doctoral degrees in Communication.

Last month, Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson traveled with doctoral students in her COMM 710: Rhetorical Criticism course for a daylong series of meetings in Washington, D.C. The field trip provided a firsthand experience of the course’s two themes: (1) the relationship between the rhetoric of presidential campaigns and the rhetoric of governance and (2) the rhetorical role of biography, age, race, and gender in the construction of a candidate's political identity.