Message from the Head of the Department

Barbara J. Wilson

The Department of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois has a long and proud history. We are one of the oldest doctoral programs in communication in the country. We started out as the Department of Speech in 1947 with 11 professors and 14 instructors. Today we have grown to 25 professors, 5 emerti professors, and 10 instructors. We enroll approximately 50 graduate students and 550 undergraduate majors.

We consistently rank among the top five departments in the field of communication in the United States. Our faculty are engaged in cutting-edge research projects that deal with socially pressing problems in communication. Our faculty also are creative and committed teachers who bring passion and enthusiasm to the classroom. Outside the classroom, faculty actively encourage graduate students and undergraduates to get involved in research activities and independent studies. Because of our strong liberal arts approach to education, our program prepares students for employment as communication specialists in the private and public sectors. Graduates of our department have enjoyed great success in the corporate world, in the media industry, in law, in engineering, in government, and in education. Indeed, our alumni and our faculty hold positions of leadership on campus as well as off campus, nationally as well as internationally.

The department has several major areas of study, including organizational and group communication, interpersonal and family communication, communication technology, political communication, rhetoric and public discourse, communication in cultural contexts, and mass communication. The department’s newest program initiatives are in communication and health, communication technologies in the workplace, and the impact of the mass media on children and adolescents.

Several ongoing projects in the department are supported by external funding. Examples of these include:

• The program in communication and health care has a multi-year National Institutes of Health research grant of more than $500,000 to discover how communication training can enhance the ability of people living with HIV or AIDS to cope with their circumstances and opportunities.
  
• The program in organizational communication received a three-year, $1.5 million research grant from the National Science Foundation for innovative research on the use of information technology.
  
• The program in media effects recently received a five-year, $300,000 research grant from the W. T. Grant Foundation to study how the mass media affect young people’s physical identity and body image.

Our goal is to prepare students to become critical thinkers, avid consumers of information, and effective problem solvers in the 21st century. We are committed to ensuring that our graduates receive the best education available in the field of communication in any university, anywhere.