Steven Wilson, professor and director of graduate studies in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Communication, received the Distinguished Scholar award from the National Communication Association (NCA) – the association’s top scholarly award.
“Only five people from across the discipline receive this recognition each year — and many prior recipients are scholars whose work I really admire,” Wilson said.
Created in 1991, the NCA’s Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes members for a “lifetime
of scholarly achievement in the study of human communications,” and recipients are
selected to showcase the communication profession.
“I was honored and humbled to be selected as a National Communication Association
Distinguished Scholar,” Wilson said. “Only five people from across the discipline
receive this recognition each year — and many prior recipients are scholars whose
work I really admire.”
Wilson describes his interest in communication as driven by both practical and theoretical
concerns, often drawing upon his own personal experiences as the basis for his research.
“For example, several colleagues and I just completed a study looking at what dilemmas
or tensions people who were vaccinated for COVID-19 early during the pandemic experienced
when encouraging other hesitant family members to get vaccinated. That project arose
from my own experience of talking with several extended family members. But explaining
why these conversations can be difficult is complicated - lots of factors such as
how the pandemic became politicized, growing public mistrust of media and public health
institutions, and our cultural expectations for family communication have to be considered.
Communication theory is helpful in answering such questions,” he explained.
In addition to the focus on difficult conversations and resilience, much of Wilson’s
research is focused on military and veteran families. He next research endeavor will
explore how U.S. military veterans create or enact resilience through interactions
with others during the first year after they separate from the military and return
to civilian life.
“A lot of research in the military-veteran context has viewed resilience as a trait,
whereas our work is focused on the process by which veterans enact resilience through
the ways they maintain and modify routines, enact identities, reach out to social
networks and so forth,” he said.
Wilson joined the Department of Communication in 2018. Since then, he has received
numerous accolades including earning USF’s 2023 Faculty Outstanding Research Achievement Award, the 2022 NCA Interpersonal Division's Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Book Award for
the book, "Reflections on Interpersonal Communication Research," published by Cognella
in 2019 with co-author Dr. Sandi Smith, and the NCA Top Paper Award from the Communication
and Military Division in 2021 for his collaborative research on “Analyzing News Media
Framing of the Military-Civilian Divide.”
In 2023, Communication Education named him one of the top 1% of communication scholars
based on the number of peer-review articles published in communication journals between
2017 and 2021.
While his personal accolades continue to expand, so too does his appreciation for
being a member of the Department of Communication faculty at USF.
“The department has a robust undergraduate major and a strong graduate program. I
enjoy being part of a faculty that approaches communication from a variety of perspectives
and methods, and that values applied and community- engaged research,” he said. “My
faculty colleagues work with colleagues across campus and in the Tampa Bay area on
topics like food insecurity, communicating about genetics and cancer, media representations
and race, and the implications of social media for our democracy.”
Learn more about the Department of Communication.