Faculty

Sarah Burgess is an Associate Professor in Communication Studies, Gender and Sexualities Studies, and Critical Diversity Studies. Working at the intersections of rhetorical theory, political theory, legal theory, philosophy, and gender and sexualities studies, she examines the rhetorical contours of recognition in order to understand the possibilities and limits of justice. She recently edited a special issue of Philosophy & Rhetoric that brought together authors from several disciplines to...

Dr. Zifei Fay Chen is an assistant professor in the communication studies department. Specialized in public relations and strategic communication, Chen’s research focuses on corporate social responsibility, social media strategies, startup and entrepreneurial public relations, and crisis communication and management. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights, her research agenda centers on examining the factors and mechanisms that drive stakeholders’ attitudes and behaviors toward organizations in...

Marilyn (Bordwell) DeLaure teaches courses in rhetoric, criticism, and social movements. Her research investigates how people effect social change, focusing especially on embodied performance. She has published essays on dance, civil rights rhetoric, and environmental activism, and is co-editor of Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance (NYU Press). She is also a producer of the award-winning documentary film MOTHERLOAD about the cargo bicycling movement.

Evelyn Y. Ho is a professor of communication studies, Asian Pacific American studies, and critical diversity studies, and a faculty chair of the Honors College at the University of San Francisco. Beginning with an understanding that communication is a cultural activity and that health care systems and beliefs are profoundly cultural, Professor Ho's teaching and research focus broadly on the intersections of health, culture, and communication. Health care in the United States is increasingly...

Marco Jacquemet teaches courses in communication and culture, intercultural communication, geographies of communication, and justice and social change. His scholarship focuses on the communicative mutations produced by the circulation of migrants and media idioms in the Mediterranean area. His more recent book project is called Transidioma: Language and Power in the 21st Century. He is also present in Italian media activist networks, where he investigates the link between media and power.

Brandi Lawless is an associate professor in the communication studies department. Broadly, her research can be defined as critical intercultural communication — an area of research concerned with understanding power, privilege, marginalization, hegemony, and ideologies. She is interested in the ways individuals (re)produce and communicate identities and subjectivities at the intersections of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and other aspects of identity. Her most recent work has explored...

Allison Thorson is an associate professor in the communication studies department. Her research focuses on interpersonal and family communication with an emphasis on how individuals and families communicatively manage and maintain individual and relational well-being in the context of (often deemed taboo) unexpected, hurtful, or non-normative events and underexplored relationship types.Her work has been published in outlets such as Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, The Journal of...

Bryan Whaley teaches courses in social influence, message design in health interaction, communication and disability, and experimental research methods. His research interests concern the relationship between language/message variables and social influence, linguistic and social cognitive factors related to illness explanation and compliance messages in health contexts, linguistic and visual strategies for explaining health-related, scientific or complex information, and communication...