Rate My Professor Dawn Gilpin

Dawn Gilpin serves as Assistant Dean for Research, Associate Professor, and Doctoral Program Director at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She chairs the doctoral committee, leads research initiatives, and teaches courses in public relations and social media, including an online social media course open to all majors. Her professional career prior to academia included more than 15 years in public relations practice, primarily in Italy. Since joining ASU in 2008, Gilpin has held roles such as Associate Dean, Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, and Affiliated Faculty at the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. She is a member of the National Communication Association, International Communication Association, and Academy of Management, and participates in the Graduate Education Leadership Committee.

Gilpin's research specializes in the interactions between organizations, media, and public policy, with a focus on the dynamics of knowledge, power, identity, and reputation through the lens of complexity theory. Her interests encompass emergent innovation in public universities, narrative geographies, cultural interdependencies, crisis management, social media privacy and identity construction, and organizational communities. Key publications include the book Crisis Management in a Complex World (Oxford University Press, 2008, with Priscilla Murphy, 471 citations); "Organizational Image Construction in a Fragmented Online Media Environment" (Journal of Public Relations Research, 2010, 308 citations); "Working the Twittersphere: Microblogging as Professional Identity Construction" (in The Networked Self, 2010, 148 citations); "Exploring Complex Organizational Communities: Identity as Emergent Perceptions, Boundaries, and Relationships" (Communication Theory, 2013, with N. K. Miller, 43 citations); "NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics" (2020); "Narrative Geographies of the Coronavirus: Cultural Interdependencies and the Emergence of New Assemblages" (2022); and "Complexity and Emergent Innovation in Public Universities" (2024). As Principal Investigator, she has secured multiple grants from the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs for the Study of the United States Institutes (SUSI) on topics including journalism, technology, and democracy (2021–2024), and serves as Co-Investigator on projects like LibrES: Por un El Salvador sin Violencia de Genero.