Lang wins Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research
Distinguished professor emerita Annie Lang has been selected as the 2022 recipient of the Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research, awarded by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Lang is a renowned communication scholar in media research. Her research focuses on understanding communication and media from a human-centered complex systems perspective.
“My work spanned a very interesting period in communication research,” Lang said.
At the beginning of her career, most communication research examined how aspects of the media influenced behavior.
“In between the ‘thing in the media’ and the media user’s behavior was something called the black box — the human brain processing and responding to that message,” she said. “Almost no one was studying what happened to the message as it was perceived, embodied by the brain, ‘thought’ about and then responded to with some combination of thoughts, emotion and/or behavior. I spent my career trying to pry open that black box and figure out what was going on inside it.”
The award recognizes a body of significant research over the course of an individual’s career.
The first national award Lang won was the Kreighbaum Under Forty Award, she said, also from AEJMC.
“Now, probably, the very last award I will have won is their distinguished research award. It makes a lovely pair of bookends for my career,” Lang said.
The award will be presented at the AEJMC conference in Detroit in August.
“I was extremely pleased to win this award and very much appreciate the work of my colleagues in the Communication Science Unit in nominating me for the award,” Lang said.
The award is named in honor of Paul J. Deutschmann, who developed the College of Communication Arts at Michigan State University. It recognizes the top scholars in the association who have made a major impact on the research of the field during their career.