Studies A Welcome Message from the Department Head Welcome to our Web site. Each concentration places communication theory at its core.
Faculty collaborate on research and teaching, often across programs.
Our professional interdependence may help explain our departmental culture, which is characterized by friendliness and helpfulness rather than isolation and competition. We are hoping soon to establish a graduate program, and during 1999-2000 we implemented a new core curriculum which gives our majors an integrated, innovative understanding of the rapidly changing field of communication, a field now at the intellectual and economic forefront of the global information society. Our hiring of several new tenure-track faculty members over the past three years has added significantly to who we are and what we can accomplish. They also participate in our community, state and nation through various outreach and educational programs, and receive prestigious appointments, grants and contracts. In the past couple of years, to select a few examples, one member of our faculty served as Lombard Visiting Professor at Harvard, another won a Kaiser Foundation grant to study the depiction of Hispanics in media, a third obtained a Folger grant for research on colonial history and rhetoric at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. and a fourth garnered a North Carolina Department of Transportation grant to explore ways that public communication can help the state to protect its natural environment.