GW's Robert Entman Wins Prestigious Humboldt Prize: Entman is World's First Political Communications Scholar to Receive Award

WASHINGTON - Robert Entman, J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor of Media and Public Affairs and professor of international affairs at the George Washington U, has won the prestigious international Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for his field-changing contributions to political communication. Entman is the world's first political communication scholar and the first from GW to receive this award, and he will work at the Free U of Berlin for the majority of 2012. While in Germany, he will conduct comparative research in order to better understand how inequality has grown faster in the United States than in Western Europe.

"I am delighted to be the first Humboldt Award recipient recognized for contributions to political communication scholarship," said Entman. "I appreciate this acknowledgment of the media's fundamental role in shaping politics and democracy."

Entman's award-winning research focuses on media framing and bias and the media's influence on foreign policy, race relations and other important areas of American politics. His 1993 conceptualization of framing has been cited in thousands of scholarly works. Dr. Entman will release a new book in March 2012 entitled Scandal and Silence: Media Responses to Presidential Misconduct. Using a series of recent case studies, he argues against the commonly-held view that media eagerly work themselves into "feeding frenzies" over sex scandals and other wrong-doings by top politicians.

Read more: http://smpa.gwu.edu/news/articles/238

Tamara Afifi, U of California, Santa Barbara was awarded the 2011 Bernard J. Brommel Award for outstanding contribution to the field of family communication.

Dave Seibold, U of California, Santa Barbara, won this year's National Communication Association's Career Achievement Award in the Group Communication Division his advancement of the study of group-based communication.

Linda L. Putnam, U of California, Santa Barbara won the 2011 Academy of Management Distinguished Service Award for promoting organizational communication studies in the field of management, developing conflict management research in organizations, and serving to the Academy of Management through multiple divisions and association-wide committees.

Dorothy Mullin, U of California, Santa Barbara, received a 2011 Teaching Assistant Departmental Grant of $2000 for TA orientation training, skills workshops, and online resources from the Office of the Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Programs.

Andrew Flanagin, U of California, Santa Barbara, along with Divyakant Agrawal (Computer Science), Stacy Patterson (Mechanical Engineering), Bassam Bamieh (Mechanical Engineering) and Amr El Abbadi (Computer Science) received a 2011-2013 grant in the amount of $199,934 from the National Science Foundation, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems for the research project "Data-Driven Frameworks for Analyzing User Interactions in Social Media."