Barbie Zelizer Awarded Doctor Honoris Causa by Universidade Católica Portuguesa

Professor Zelizer was presented with the degree by D. Manuel Clemente, Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon and Chancellor of Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

On Thursday February 2, Barbie Zelizer, Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication, was awarded with a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Lisbon.

The ceremony honoring Professor Zelizer was presided over by D. Manuel Clemente, Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon and Chancellor of Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory, and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored or edited fifteen books, including the award-winning About To Die: How News Images Move the Public and Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye, and over 150 articles, book chapters, and essays. 

Barbie Zelizer and José Manuel Barroso
Zelizer and José Manuel Barroso, fellow honoree at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa ceremony

In 2020, Zelizer was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Freedom Forum Center Research Fellowship; a Fellowship from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy; a Fellowship from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; a Fulbright Senior Scholar; a Fellowship from Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and an ACLS Fellowship.

She is the co-organizer, with the Dean of Faculty of Human Sciences Nelson Ribeiro, of the Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication hosted at the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidade Católica Portuguesa and at the Research Center for Communication and Culture. 

Coeditor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism and former Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication, she is a past President of the International Communication Association, where she is also a Fellow, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She is a former Judge of the Peabody Awards for Excellence in Electronic Media, and her work has been translated into French, Korean, Turkish, Romanian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, and Portuguese. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled How the Cold War Drives the News.