The Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) is an interdisciplinary program designed to prepare students to be excellent researchers, scholars, teachers, and industry leaders. This program 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 to study oral, written, visual, computational, and multimodal forms of communication and rhetoric and digital media; to examine the transformation of communication in the context of converging digital media and communication networks; and to address the theoretical challenges of innovative, interdisciplinary research.

The CRDM faculty guide students in this 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.

Research Areas

The CRDM faculty cover a wide range of research interests, but what ties CRDM all together is our focus on innovative and creative research. Our students are prepared to collaborate with scholars across disciplines and to engage with topics in communication, rhetoric, and media studies.

Communication

How does communication shape and impact the world around us? Our core faculty focus on research areas such as the communication of science and technology, communication networks, technical communication, communication theory, linguistics, risk communication, environmental communication, crisis communication, activism, and organizational communication.

Rhetoric

How is rhetoric used and to what ends? Our core faculty focus on research areas such as the rhetoric of science, composition studies, rhetorical theory and criticism, professional writing, rhetoric of health and medicine, visual rhetoric, discourse analysis, and digital rhetoric.

Digital Media

How does digital media inform, connect, and persuade us? Our core faculty focus on research areas such as media history, networked mobilities, game studies, media theory, film studies, digital humanities, artificial intelligence, electronic literature, critical making, and user experience.

Want to Learn More?

To learn more about CRDM, you can look at what our faculty has been working on through the CRDM faculty profile pages. If you have any questions, you can reach us through email at crdm-inquiries@ncsu.edu.