2024-2025 Graduate & Professional Studies Catalog
Department of Communication
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The department offers the Doctor of Philosophy in Communication. Students entering the program without a prior Communication MA may pick up one from the department along the way. The curriculum emphasizes critical, cultural, historical, philosophical, and theoretical approaches to studying contexts of power, knowledge, and desire that exert differential impacts on various bodies and groups. Departmental research, teaching, and extracurricular community interventions attend to structures of power informing race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, ability, and other intersecting axes of social difference. Many students and faculty members examine the forms of persuasion, protest, silence, coming-to-voice, testimony, noise, and imagination needed to transform such power structures that produce and reproduce inequality.
Contact Information
Director of Graduate Studies: Dr. Brent Malin
Main Office: 1433 Cathedral of Learning
412-624-6798
Fax: 412-624-1878
E-mail: bmalin@pitt.edu
http://www.comm.pitt.edu/
Additional information concerning the department’s graduate program may be obtained by contacting commgrad@pitt.edu or writing to University of Pittsburgh, Department of Communication, Graduate Admissions, 1433 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260.
Admissions
Admission is highly selective, and limited to those who can be funded for five years. Applications to the doctoral program are reviewed holistically. In order to be considered for admission to graduate standing, students must meet the requirements of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and supply (by the first business day of the year) all materials called for in the department’s application guidelines, including a completed application form, copies of all post-secondary educational records, at least three letters of recommendation, a statement of purpose, and writing sample. Non-native speakers of English without a degree from an accredited institution of higher education in the U.S. must also have the Educational Testing Service send TOEFL scores as part of the application. Citizens of other nations follow a separate set of guidelines that include TOEFL requirements and, if they are offered admission, certified /notarized translations of transcripts and diplomas for applicants from countries where English is not the official language. Upon admission, candidates will be assigned an advisor who will assist them in planning a course of study.
Financial Assistance
The department makes every effort to sustain funding and full remission of tuition for five years of doctoral study for students entering directly from undergraduate or MA programs. In addition to teaching assistantships there are also several non-teaching fellowships, including some dedicated to underrepresented groups, available through the University. See the listing of available fellowships for all graduate students at the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences http://www.asgraduate.pitt.edu/financial-support
William Pitt Debating Union
Graduate students interested in public argument and argumentation theory can pursue co-curricular study and teaching of argumentation practices by working with the William Pitt Debating Union (WPDU), one of the nation’s most venerable debating societies.
Faculty
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Faculty
ProgramsDoctoralMaster’s
CoursesCommunication: Rhet & Comm
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