Phelps Named Chair of UA’s Advertising and Public Relations Department

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dr. Joseph Phelps has been named chair of the department of advertising and public relations in The University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Sciences.

Phelps, who is the Reese Phifer Professor of Advertising and Public Relations, joined UA in 1990 as an assistant professor in the department of advertising and public relations.

In 1999, the Direct Marketing Educational Foundation selected Phelps as the Outstanding Direct Marketing Educator. He has served as head of the Advertising Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and as president of the American Academy of Advertising. He currently serves as the AEJMC representative on the Council of Communication Association’s Committee on the social science citation index.

His main research interests include understanding consumer privacy concerns relating to marketers’ use of consumer information and computer facilitated consumer-to-consumer communications. He has published in a wide variety of marketing and advertising journals and recently began publishing his research in medical journals.

He served as editor of volumes one through three of Frontiers of Direct & Interactive Marketing Research and as guest editor of the Journal of Advertising Education. He currently serves on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, the Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising, Journal of Interactive Advertising, the Journal of Advertising Education, the Newspaper Research Journal, the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising, the International Journal of Integrated Marketing Communication and Communicative Business, an Italian research review on business communication.

“I am extremely pleased to have Dr. Phelps serve as chair of the advertising and public relations department,” said Dr. Loy Singleton, dean of the College of Communication and Information Sciences. “The department has made remarkable progress in recent years, and I am confident that Dr. Phelps will build on that progress as chair.”

He succeeds Dr. Bruce Berger, who will stay in the department as a professor.

Phelps earned his doctorate and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received his bachelor’s degree from Saint Norbert College.