Walid Afifi appointed chair of the Department of Communication Studies

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

The University of Iowa has named Walid Afifi, Ph.D., as chair of the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Afifi is currently professor in the Department of Communication at University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he serves as chair of the undergraduate program in Middle East Studies. He also is an affiliate of UCSB's Center for Middle East Studies and a faculty associate with its Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior. He will begin his appointment at the University of Iowa on August 21, 2013.Walid Afifi, Ph.D.

Walid Afifi, Ph.D. (Photo by Rod Rolle)

Dean Chaden Djalali of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences said, “Walid Afifi will bring nationally recognized leadership, scholarship and teaching to our Department of Communication Studies, which has a long tradition of excellence at Iowa. We are very pleased to welcome Professor Afifi to our college and university.”

Afifi, whose areas of scholarly emphasis are interpersonal and health communication, has published more than 55 journal articles and book chapters, and has co-authored three books. He is particularly well known for developing and testing the theory of motivated information management, a social-psychological framework that examines the relationship between uncertainty and information seeking. He has served in editorial positions for national and international journals and as chair of the Interpersonal Divisions of the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association.

Walid Afifi, who earned a bachelor of arts degree with honors from the University of Iowa in 1990, earned his doctoral degree in 1996 from the University of Arizona. He began his career at the University of Delaware before joining the faculty at Pennsylvania State University in 1998. In 2006, he joined the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he earned the rank of full professor in 2009. He has served as visiting professor at the American University of Beirut and Kent State University. He will succeed interim chair Marc P. Armstrong as head of the Department of Communication Studies.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.