Wilbur Schramm

Wilbur Schramm
BornWilbur Lang Schramm
(1907-08-05)August 5, 1907
Marietta, Ohio
DiedDecember 27, 1987(1987-12-27) (aged 80)
Honolulu, Hawaii
OccupationJournalist, writer, academic
LanguageEnglish
EducationB.A., Marietta College
M.A., Harvard University
Ph.D., University of Iowa
Notable worksMass Media and National Development
Notable awardsO. Henry Prize

Wilbur Lang Schramm (August 5, 1907 – December 27, 1987) was an American scholar and "authority on mass communications".[1] He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars.[2] Schramm's mass communication program in the Iowa School of Journalism was a pilot project for the doctoral program and for the Institute of Communications Research, which he founded in 1947 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, now housed in the UIUC College of Media.[3] At Illinois, Wilbur Schramm set in motion the patterns of scholarly work in communication study that continue to this day.[2]

  1. ^ "Wilbur Schramm; Wrote Many Works On Communications". New York Times. 1 January 1988.
  2. ^ a b Rogers, Everett (1994). A History of Communication Study: A Biological Approach. NY: The Free Press. p. 29.
  3. ^ "Institute of Communications Research, PhD". media.illinois.edu. Archived from the original on September 6, 2015. Retrieved 17 March 2023.