Janis Teruggi Page, Ph.D., professorial lecturer in the Strategic Public Relations master’s program, has received a Fulbright Distinguished Chair award for 2018. She will be at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic for four months during the Fall 2018 semester.
Page’s Fulbright project is entitled, “Preparing Czech Students for Ethical Leadership: Best Practices in Strategic Communication, Public Relations & Social Responsibility Engagement.” She will lecture and teach courses in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism, Faculty of Social Studies.
She will also conduct research on social responsibility engagement and communication in the Czech Republic. She will explore activities of in-nation foreign businesses and global PR agencies—and collaborations between enterprises, NGOs and the government—to understand the nature and challenges of communication. For another research stream, she will photograph public visual culture as expressions of issue advocacy and strategic messaging. The Fulbright award gives Page the ability to be a visitor as well as a participant in another university system, giving her opportunities to both lecture on PR and CSR, and to extend her research beyond the country’s borders.
Page is hoping to meet some of her new colleagues in late May when she travels to Prague to attend the annual conference of the International Communication Association. She is participating in a 5-scholar research panel she organized, “Intercultural visual communication for global encounters” and is also presenting her research on the visual rhetoric of online hate speech and its influences.
Page recently co-authored a significant PR textbook with SPR Program Director, Lawrence J. Parnell. A Sage publication, Introduction to Strategic Public Relations: Digital, Global, and Socially Responsible Communication is designed to develop ethical communicators concerned with building trust and respect with diverse communities.
Page has taught in the SPR program since 2008 and was named the 2016 Professor of the Year in the College of Professional Studies.
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