CU Boulder CMCI Communication

To wrap up our series, we have Dr. Tim Kuhn!

Dr. Kuhn gave a talk titled "What do Corporations Want?: Corporate Purpose, Branding, and Authority in a Startup Accelerator,” at Anadolu University in Eskisehir, Turkiye.

What an awesome summer full of travel, teaching, learning, resting, conferecing, olymping (new word?) and more!

Our COMM Department was EVERYWHERE this summer! Where were YOU? Let us know in the comments!

For our next post in the series "Where in the World was Cu COMM this Summer" we share our amazing graduate student Michelle Brown-Juel travels!

Michelle was in Germany with her family this summer. She shared several photos of her time there visiting and learning about local practices, culture and customs!

What an amazing series! We can’t stop sharing our COMM Department’s summers!

This summer, our Dr. Karen Ashkraft attended the EGOS (European Group for Organization Studies) conference in Milan, Italy in July. Dr. Joelle Cruz and former UCB PhD student turned Associate Professor Kate Harris were also presenting at the conference!

She also went to a silent retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California! What an awesome and balanced summer!

Next up is Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Dr. Jo Marras Tate!

This summer Dr. Jo had the opportunity to be a fellow at the 2024 Animal Studies Summer Institute hosted by the Center of Advanced Study at the University of Illinois where she participated in lectures and activities that included an animal farm visit and even meeting bug ambassadors (meet Rhinocerous Beetle!).

Jo also went to Brazil to visit family!

In our next "Where in the World was CU COMM this Summer" series: Dr. David Boromisza Habashi!

Dr. DBH was in Egypt, representing CMCI as his son at Marsa Matrouh rocked a CMCI hat.

Secondly, he was at the Gold Coast for the International Communciation Association Conference, where many COMM folks attended, like graduate student Laine Zizka, and Professors Natasha Shrikant and Leah Sprain. The group pic shows Dr. Sprain and Dr. DBH at the Language and Social Interaction (LSI) gathering with Evelyn Ho, our last JJones speaker and Tamar Katriel, a famous LSI scholar!

Next up in our “Where in the world was CU COMM this summer” series: Dr. Matt Koschmann!

This summer, Dr. Koschmann took another research trip to the Philippines for ongoing research for his forthcoming book project titled The Philippines Road Home: Developing a Communicative Approach to Participation for Informal Settlement Housing.

On this trip, Dr. Koschmann followed along with two nonprofit housing organizations. They visited several of their housing project sites throughout the Luzon and Visayas regions, conducting interviews and focus groups with many of the community members, nonprofit workers, and government officials involved in these projects.

The book presents a series of case studies of participatory housing projects in the Philippines, grounded in the research literature on nonprofit organizational communication and civil society collaboration.

Additionally, Dr. Koschmann also gave a lecture about his research at De La Salle University in Manila, hosted by the Department of Communication.

Next up in our “Where in the World was CU COMM this summer” series: Professor Phaedra Pezzullo!

In response to her book Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care (University of California Press, 2024), Professor Pezzullo was invited by engineers to be part of a discussion of a circular economy and reduction of plastic pollution in the Dominican Republic this past May. Pictured is the conference, bilingual post-it brainstorming, and an excursion to a local dump. She was also introduced to Dembow, Dominican trap music, which her hosts recommended for dancing!

Up first, we’ve got Dr. Michael Burns who did an instagram takeover last Friday while in Paris!

It was so awesome to listen directly from him as he covered the Olympics for the Today Show. Prior to France, Dr. Burns was in Rome, Florence, Vienna, and Salzburg!

Our next series highlights where in the world our faculty members took their research this past summer. Follow along in the coming posts to see what your COMM department was up to! 👀

Make sure you tune in this Friday, August 9th, to our Instagram account to hear directly from our own Dr. Michael Burns in Paris! He has been working with the Today Show () during this year's in France!

We can’t believe it has been one whole year since our INCREDIBLE Admin Assistant, Sonia Fraser, joined our team! Since last year, Sonia has become an intricate and essential member of our Department team and we feel so lucky to have her.

Read on to learn what Sonia loves most about working in the COMM department:

“1. The people: the people of Comm are the number one reason I love this job. Everyone has been so kind and supportive throughout my learning process in this new role.
2. The academic environment: I love all of the opportunities to learn and grow that are baked into my job. The academic environment is very exciting to be a part of.
3. The variety of work: I enjoy the wide variety of things I get to work on, from events to class scheduling and beyond, it keeps things active and interesting.”

Sonia- thank you for all you do! We don’t know where we’d be without you. Cheers to another fantastic year! 🥳

We are thrilled to announce our new department chair, Dr. Cindy White!

Dr. White previously served as the Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education - her research explores how patterns of interaction form the foundation for personal relationships.

We are excited to have you as the Communication Department Chair, Dr. White - congratulations!

We’d like to kick off this week by expressing our immense gratitude for Dr. Tim Kuhn. Over the past four years, Dr. Tim Kuhn has served as the Communication Department’s chair. He has helped the department navigate extremely unprecedented times, from COVID, to economic crises, to global violence that shook our lives and program to its core.

Dr. Kuhn, we are grateful for your committed service as Department Chair. Thank you for everything!

Another exciting promotion to announce: Congratulations to Dr. Jamie Skerski for being promoted to Teaching Professor! Teaching Professor’s are principal instructors and hold the highest ranking and position across CU Boulder’s Teaching Professor Series.

Dr. Skerski earned a PhD in Communication and Culture from Indiana University in 2005, where she focused on the intersection of gender, media and rhetoric. Dr. Skerski has been the course director for Public Speaking since 2011 and also teaches courses about discourse and identity, rhetorical criticism, and communication and sport. Her most recent research project investigated discourses around the contemporary tomboy.

Fun Fact: Dr. Skerski currently serves as the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies for the Comm department as well!

Congrats again, Dr. Skerski! We are so proud to have you as a member of our department.

Congratulations to Dr. Ruth Hickerson Dominski for being promoted to Teaching Professor!

Dr. Hickerson Dominski previously served as a college administrator, focusing on student retention and persistence. This informed her work on the creation, implementation, and assessment of student success, faculty development, and universal design for learning programs. Dr. Hickerson Dominski’s research combines the academic areas of interpersonal communication, language and social interaction, and family communication into a comprehensive agenda that primarily focuses on how language is used both as a sense-making technique and as a means to construct the identity of self and others.

Fun Fact: Teaching Professors are principal instructors and hold the highest ranking and position across CU Boulder’s Teaching Professor Series. 🤩

Congratulations again, Dr. Hickerson Dominski! We are so proud to have you as a member of our department.

Another piece of amazing department news coming your way! We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Phaedra Pezzullo has been promoted to full Professor!

Dr. Pezzullo has been an example of interdisciplinary work and vast accomplishments in the field of Environmental Communication. She is well known across our campus, as part of Inside The Greenhouse and founder and Co-Director of C3BC (the Center for Creative Climate Communication and Behavior Change), and the Just Transition Collaborative. Her promotion is not only a recognition of how hard she’s worked, but also a way to note how much she’s touched the lives of her students, colleagues, and the many communities she serves.

A huge congratulations, Dr. Pezzullo! We are so lucky to have you as a part of our department.

We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Kristella Montiegel will begin this Fall (2024) as an assistant professor with our department!

Dr. Montiegel has been a Chancellor’s Postdoc in the Department of Communication for the past two years. She is a language and social interaction researcher who received her PhD in Sociology from . Her primary research methods are conversation analysis and ethnography. You can find her work in Communication Monographs, Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Processes, and other journals as well.

Welcome, Dr. Montiegel!