Thomas Jacobson
Thomas Jacobson was appointed Interim Dean of the School of Media and Communication effective July 1, 2009.
Before coming to Temple, Dr. Jacobson was at the State University of New York at Buffalo for seventeen years where he served as Chair of the Department of Communication, was Interim Dean of the School of Informatics, and founding Director of the Informatics Research Center. He has also been a visiting professor at Northwestern and Cornell.
His principal areas of research address globalization and political communication, focusing recently on deliberative processes and governance reform in developing countries.
In the past, Dr. Jacobson was President of the Participatory Communication Research Section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research, for which he is currently Chair of that Association’s Scholarly Review Committee. He is also a member of the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. In addition, he sits on the editorial advisory boards of a number of journals, including Communication Monographs, Telematics & Informatics, and Communication for Social Change.
His recent publications include Jacobson, T. and Pan, L. (forthcoming), Indicators of Citizen Voice for Assessing Media Development: A Communicative Action Approach; Evaluating the Evaluators: Measures of Press Freedom and Media Contributions to Development (eds.; Monroe Price and Susan Abbott, Center for Global Communication Studies; Odugbemi, S. & Jacobson, T. (2008) Governance Reform Under Real World Conditions: Citizens, Stakeholders, and Voice, Washington DC: The World Bank; and Jacobson, T. (2008). Harmonious Society, Civil Society and the Media: A Communicative Action Perspective in China Media Research (Vol. 4, No. 4: 31-38).
His recent presentations include ”Origins of Media Development: Modernization Theory - Its Legacy and Its Critics” at the seminar on Media, Democratization and International Development: Foundations for a More Robust Research Agenda, Central European University, Budapest, June 30, 2009; and “Indicating Citizen Voice: Communicative Action Measures for Media Development,” at the Workshop on Measuring Press Freedom and Democracy: Methodologies, Uses, and Impact, University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communication, Center for Global Communication Studies, November 5, 2007.
He received his PhD from the University of Washington.