Rate My Professor Elissa Foster

Elissa Foster, PhD, is a tenured Professor in the Communication Studies department within DePaul University’s College of Communication. She holds a PhD from the University of South Florida. As Faculty Fellow of the DePaul Humanities Center from 2022 to 2024, she received support for completing her first novel. Her research centers on the relationship between communication and health, focusing on difficult conversations at the beginning and end of life, clinical environments, and preserving the whole person in institutional contexts including academia. Foster employs narrative inquiry, autoethnography, qualitative methods, and studies in health professions education. Her work extends to medical cannabis use, including gender differences in usage, physician support, prescription discontinuation, and perceived efficacy for co-occurring health-related quality of life symptoms.

Foster has authored over thirty academic articles, a dozen book chapters, and the book Communicating at the End of Life: Finding Magic in the Mundane (Routledge, 2017; originally Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007). Select publications include “Commitment, communication, and contending with heteronormativity: An invitation to greater reflexivity in interpersonal research” (Southern Communication Journal, 2008), “Preferences for medical marijuana over prescription medications among persons living with chronic conditions: alternative, complementary, and tapering uses” (The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2018), “Physicians’ stories: Autoethnography, presence, and rhizomatic inquiry” (International Review of Qualitative Research, 2014), “End of Life and Families” (The International Encyclopedia of Health Communication, 2022), and “There Was an Old Woman Who... Lost Patience With the Academy and Performed Her Frustration at a Public Meeting” (Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2023). She contributes to DePaul’s Dialogue Collaborative, fostering compassionate communication, and engages in faculty development. Through her teaching, Foster instills confidence in students to improve the world via effective communication.