The Ph.D. Program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media prepares doctoral students to analyze the social, cultural, rhetorical, philosophical, and political dimensions of information technologies, new communication media, and digital texts, and to actively engage digital media through research, criticism, production, and practice.
Students work with program faculty from the departments of Communication and English and with affiliated faculty from departments across the university and the broader UNC system to study oral, written, visual, computational, and multimodal forms of communication and rhetoric; to examine the transformation of communication in the context of converging digital media and communication networks; and to address the theoretical and practical challenges of innovative, interdisciplinary research.
Students can create programs of study in areas such as Social Media, Interpersonal Communication, Environmental Communication, Critical Making, Emerging Digital Genres, Multimedia Research in Digital Media, Composition Studies, Digital Humanities, Rhetoric Theory, Digital Rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric, Digital Media Production, Science and Technology Studies, Risk Communication, Organizational Communication, Mobile Communication, Technology and Pedagogy, Game Studies, Online Information Design, Public Relations, Technical and Professional Communication, Digital Literacies, Transcultural Communication, Visual Communication, and Cultural Studies.
Faculty guide students in their work by using a broad range of social scientific and humanistic methods in which they specialize. The program offers comprehensive mentoring for professional development, diverse opportunities for teaching experience, and research assistantships associated with grant-funded faculty projects. CRDM faculty and students collaborate with colleagues in science and technology fields across the university and the Research Triangle.
Our graduates have been very successful finding employment in a variety of positions in academia (both at research-intensive universities and at teaching-oriented liberal arts colleges), government and corporate organizations, where there is a growing demand for the interdisciplinary skill sets developed in CRDM.