faculty news

Faculty Awards & Achievements

The Swedish Research Council has selected W. Lance Bennett to hold the national Olof Palme Chair for 2011. The Swedish Parliament (Riksdagen) created the Olof Palme Chair in 1987 in memory of the late Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, to promote research on conflict prevention and peace research in a broad sense, with particular regard to international politics and comparative studies on social institutions. Bennett will be in residence at Stockholm University during his tenure as the Olof Palme chair.

A new center takes up residence at the Department of Communication. The UW Center for Local Strategies Research supports research that informs and assists efforts to develop and implement practices and policies for meeting human needs in local communities. The Center is the brainchild of Professor Gerry Philipsen, the center’s Director. Dr. Lisa Coutu, a Principal Lecture in the Department, is Associate Director.

The Panhellenic Association at the University of Washington named David Domke the 2010 Faculty Member of the Year for Most Inspirational Professor.

John Gastil’s new book The Group in Society was published in 2009. For more information, visit http://depts.washington.edu/group/

John Gastil is a recent recipient of three prestigious awards:

  • National Science Foundation as a Principal Investigator on: "Investigating the Electoral Impact and Deliberation of the Oregon Citizens' Initiative Review" ($218,000).
  • University of Washington Royalty Research Fund. as a Principal Investigator on: "Panel Survey Investigation of the Oregon Citizen Initiative Review" ($40,000).
  • National Science, as a Principal Investigator on: "SGER: Assessing the Deliberative Quality and Impact of the Australian Citizens and Online Parliaments"). The grant will be used to study the efficacy of mixing online and face-to-face deliberative processes in the Australian Citizens and Online Parliaments ($96,980).

Malcolm Parks will take over as editor in chief of the Journal of Communication. The Journal of Communication is the flagship research journal of the International Communication Association, one of the largest and most prestigious professional associations of scholars interested in communication. The journal is one of the most respected and frequently cited research journals in the discipline. Under Parks’ leadership, it will expand from four to six issues per year to accommodate the high number of quality research papers submitted annually.

Oxford University Press has invited Patricia Moy to serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliographies Online (Communication) (OBO), an authoritative online resource for various disciplines. The goal of this project is to provide a resource that allows students, scholars, and practitioners to filter a vast volume of information and sources to a manageable array of material that is reliable and directly relevant.

Nancy Rivenburgh is the recipient of funding from the University of Washington’s College of Arts and Science's "Transition Funds" initiative to develop a two-credit workshop series for undergraduates, Creativity through Communication. The proposal grew out of our departmental faculty retreat, two years ago, during which we identified creativity as an essential academic and professional skill and, as such, an important learning goal for our students. The first workshop, "Creative Problem Solving," will emphasize the role of diversity — cultural and intellectual — as a creative catalyst for problem solving in an increasingly globalized and interdependent world.