Melissa Aronczyk

TEACHING AND MENTORING

Graduate Teaching and Mentoring

Dr. Aronczyk is the Director of the PhD Program in Communication, Information and Media at Rutgers University (2023–2026). Her primary role is to mentor and guide PhD students on their dissertation pathway, from their first year through post-graduate job placement.

She also runs the PhD Colloquium series, featuring faculty and student research and external guest speakers.

Current PhD advisees work on topics including techno-governance and climate change; social media and political communication in state-led conflict; cities as global sites of cultural knowledge; and the communicative intimacies of wellness and media.

Dr. Aronczyk received the 2018 Outstanding PhD Faculty Mentor award from the Doctoral Student Association at Rutgers’ School of Communication & Information.

Courses taught in the PhD Program in Communication, Information and Media:

  • 16:194:631 Media Theory and Research
  • 16:194:601 Proseminar
  • 16:194:605 Critical Research Methods
  • 16:194:664 Media/Culture: Reputation and Recognition
  • 16:194:690 Writing as Craft and as Profession
  • 16:194:681 Explorations in Contemporary Media Studies

Courses taught in the Master’s program in Communication and Media:

  • 17:194:517 Media Studies: Theory and Practice
  • 17:194:51X Climate and Sustainability Communication (Fall 2026)
  • 17:194:591 Critiquing Marketing Communication

Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring

​In the undergraduate program, Journalism and Media Studies, Dr. Aronczyk teaches courses on media and politics, promotional media, and critical perspectives on strategic communication. 

She has (co-)supervised undergraduate honors theses on topics including infotainment media coverage of U.S. immigration policy; young women’s body image on social media; algorithms and radical political ideologies; micro-celebrity economies; the construction of national identity in the media; fake news in the modern ear; affective frames and branded life.

In 2024 Dr. Aronczyk was recognized for “significant contributions to the student experience” by the Institute for Teaching, Innovation & Inclusive Pedagogy. 

Digital Ethnography Working Group

Melissa Aronczyk and Jeff Lane, Directors

Based in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, the mission of the Digital Ethnography Working Group is to program events for a community of national and international scholars and students who are figuring out how to do close-up research in a digital era. We develop methods and approaches for the study of culture in both online and offline worlds, using both online and offline tools.

Recent events include Studying Online Radicalization and Disinformation, Ethnography in Information Science, Methods for the Climate Crisis, Ethnographies of the Datafied State, Doing Risky Research: Integrity, Impact and Safety in Digital Ethnography, and Behind the Scenes of the Digital Ethnography Dissertation.

Watch our events on our DEWG YouTube Channel.