programs in the world. The Institute of Communications Research was founded in 1947 to address complex and urgent concerns about the growing dominance of media and mass communications in postwar public life. At a time when many academic disciplines were aspiring to greater specialization and professional sovereignty, the Institute fostered organic, collaborative and integrative scholarship. The In
stitute led the nation in offering doctoral training in communications research, attracting students whose intellectual strength and curiosity matches that of their mentors. And, like the Institute, the doctoral program began as a small and selective one, evolving organically with the entire campus as an intellectual resource. The Institute of Communications Research has evolved within the larger history of communications and media in this country. The Institute pioneered and remains a leader in the interdisciplinary scholarly study of media and communications, focusing broadly on the domains of systems and institutions, policy and history, and cultural theory and practice. This concentrated interdisciplinary effort to understand and explain the history, role and operation of mediated communication in today's society offers significant educational opportunities to graduate students and provides a rich resource for the campus as a whole. The Institute continues to be regarded as a leader and model for interdisciplinary communications programs. Students in the program study such topics as media economics, organization and structure; media policy; political economy of the media; new technologies and new media; telecommunications; advertising and consumer research; media ethics, media and communications history; social and cultural studies of science and medicine; popular culture and film; race ethnicity and gender; democracy and the media; and global/international communications. dissertations have addressed a wide range of topics, from intellectual property and cultural production in Africa, to the history of sound technology, to Chilean television infrastructure and policy, to advertising regulation in China.