Melissa R. Meade, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Communication Technologies
Department of Communication Media and the Arts

Dr. Melissa R. Meade is an assistant professor of Communication Technologies. Her research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of technology, work, labor, environment, and economic modernization and decline; digital and social media; identity and inequality (disability; class; gender; ethnic and racial relations; language); community engagement; research methods; social memory; and critical/cultural communication.

Shaped by her own experience as a first-generation college graduate growing up in the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Dr. Meade’s ongoing research project is a multi-year community-based and virtual ethnography of this region and its diaspora in which she investigates the many ways that global capitalism reorganizes social difference through its regimes of resource extraction, labor displacement, and environmental classism. She is founder and director of a public digital humanities forum  on which Anthracite Coal Region community members contributed their first-hand stories and artifacts illustrating life in the Coal Region. Her work bridges the gap between virtual and offline ethnography and highlights the counternarratives that residents of the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania tell about the lived experiences of deindustrialization.

Dr. Meade’s research has been published in Cultural Studies, Discourse & Communication, CineJ Cinema Journal, The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, and in edited volumes. Her commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, NPR, The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. She holds a Ph.D. from Temple University’s Lew Klein College of Media and Communication, a master’s degree in Intercultural Communication and a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Albright College.

As the recipient of awards including the National Communication Association’s Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award, the Constance Coiner Award in Working-Class Studies from the Working-Class Studies Association, and several top paper awards from National Communication Association, Dr. Meade brings notable credentials to the Seton Hall University.

Dr. Meade has been a fellow of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar, and a grantee of the Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society at Villanova University, as well as a University Fellow at Temple University. Her research has also been supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation and the Philadelphia Mayor’s Commission for People with Disabilities, to name a few. She is currently a recipient of the National Communication Association Advancing the Discipline Grant.

Before pursuing a career in academia, Dr. Meade worked and studied in various applied areas of communication including language and society, public communication, intercultural communication, and media. She speaks fluent Spanish. Prior to coming to Seton Hall University, she was a visiting assistant professor of Digital Media and Ethnography at Allegheny College, a visiting assistant professor of Communication at Villanova University, and she taught Communication and liberal arts courses at Temple University, the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Querétaro, Mexico.