Originally published September 2024. Rebuilt June 2026 as a substantive reference on the canonical PR scholars who shaped the modern discipline.
Part of EPR's Higher Education Communications cluster · Companion: Best PR & Communications Schools in 2026 · What PR Programs Actually Need to Teach in 2026
The PR Scholars Who Built the Discipline: Grunig, Dozier, Toth, and the Modern Field
Public relations as an academic discipline rests on a relatively small body of foundational scholarship produced largely between 1984 and 2007. Three names anchor the canon — James E. Grunig and David M. Dozier on the theoretical core, Elizabeth L. Toth on the extension of that core into gender, diversity, and the future of the discipline. The supporting bench of scholars who built around them produced the textbooks, the research methods, the ethics framework, and the practitioner-orientation that PR programs at the top U.S. communications schools still teach from in 2026.
This reference covers the scholars whose work continues to define the academic discipline, organized by contribution rather than rank.
The Theoretical Core: Grunig, Dozier, and the Excellence Project
The single most consequential research program in modern public relations scholarship is the Excellence Study, funded by the IABC Research Foundation between 1985 and 1991, and the resulting body of work published across the 1990s and 2000s. The principal investigators were James E. Grunig (University of Maryland), Larissa A. Grunig (University of Maryland), and David M. Dozier (San Diego State University). The Excellence Study surveyed approximately 5,400 organizations across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom and produced the empirical basis for what became known as Excellence Theory.
James E. Grunig — University of Maryland. Professor emeritus. Co-author with Todd Hunt of Managing Public Relations (1984), the foundational PR textbook that introduced the four-models framework: press agentry/publicity, public information, two-way asymmetrical, and two-way symmetrical. Co-principal investigator of the IABC Excellence Study. Co-author of Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organizations (2002), the synthesis volume from the Excellence Project. The most-cited PR scholar in academic literature.
David M. Dozier — San Diego State University. Professor emeritus. Co-author of the Excellence Project's Manager's Guide to Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (1995). Foundational research on PR roles theory — the technician-versus-manager distinction that has shaped how PR functions are structured inside organizations for thirty years. Long collaboration with the Grunigs across the Excellence Project's full arc.
Larissa A. Grunig — University of Maryland. Professor emerita. Excellence Project co-principal investigator. Co-author of Women in Public Relations: How Gender Influences Practice (2001) with Elizabeth Toth and Linda Childers Hon — the foundational empirical work on gender dynamics in PR practice.
The Extension Layer: Toth and the Discipline's Future
Elizabeth L. Toth — University of Maryland. Professor emerita. Former chair of the University of Maryland Department of Communication. Past president of the Public Relations Society of America. Editor of The Future of Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management: Challenges for the Next Generation (2007), the conceptual handoff document from the Excellence generation to subsequent scholarship. Co-author with Larissa Grunig and Linda Childers Hon on the gender-in-PR work that established the empirical foundation for the diversity scholarship that followed across the 2000s and 2010s.
Toth's editorial work in particular is the bridge between the foundational Excellence-era scholarship and the post-Excellence research agenda. PR scholars publishing after 2010 — whose work addresses social media, dialogic communication, public diplomacy, internal communication, and the AI-era developments now reshaping the field — write inside the framework Toth's 2007 volume established as the path forward.
The Textbook Layer
Three textbook authors built the curriculum that PR programs across the United States teach from. Their books have been continuously revised across decades and remain in active classroom use at programs from the top of the rankings down to small undergraduate departments.
Glen M. Broom — San Diego State University. Professor emeritus. Co-author with Scott M. Cutlip and Allen H. Center of Effective Public Relations — the single most widely adopted public relations textbook in the world, in continuous publication since 1952, now in its eleventh edition. The Cutlip-Center-Broom textbook is the standard introductory text at most U.S. communications programs. The Glen M. Broom Center for Professional Development in Public Relations at SDSU is named in his honor.
Dennis L. Wilcox — San Jose State University. Professor emeritus. Lead author of Public Relations: Strategies and Tactics, in continuous publication since 1986, now in its twelfth edition with co-authors Glen T. Cameron and Bryan H. Reber. One of the two most widely adopted PR textbooks in the United States alongside the Cutlip-Center-Broom volume.
Don W. Stacks — University of Miami. Professor. Author of Primer of Public Relations Research (third edition 2017), the standard research-methods textbook for PR graduate programs. Co-developer of the Institute for Public Relations measurement standards used across the U.S. PR industry for evaluating campaign effectiveness.
The Ethics Layer
Shannon A. Bowen — University of South Carolina. Professor of Public Relations. Lead scholar on Kantian ethics applied to public relations practice. Author of multiple peer-reviewed articles on the ethical decision-making process inside PR functions, and a member of the Page Society's Page Up Editorial Board. Bowen's work is the most-cited contemporary scholarship on PR ethics and is the standard reference for institutional PR ethics frameworks at major U.S. corporations.
The Dialogic and Engagement Layer
Maureen Taylor — University of Tennessee (previously University of Oklahoma). Professor. Co-developer with Michael L. Kent of the dialogic theory of public relations — the framework for understanding how organizations and publics engage in genuine two-way communication rather than one-way information transfer. The dialogic framework has been the dominant theoretical lens for social-media-era PR scholarship since approximately 2010.
Michael L. Kent — University of New Mexico. Professor. Co-developer with Taylor of the dialogic theory. Together, Taylor and Kent are the most-cited contemporary PR scholars after the Excellence-era generation.
The Political and Public Communications Adjacent Layer
Kathleen Hall Jamieson — University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School. Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Co-founder of FactCheck.org. Author or co-author of more than fifteen books on political communication, including Eloquence in an Electronic Age (1988), Spiral of Cynicism (1997 with Joseph Cappella), and echo chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2008). Jamieson's scholarship sits adjacent to traditional PR scholarship but its influence on how communications practitioners think about media, public opinion, and democratic discourse is foundational. Inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.
The Crisis Communications Layer
Timothy Coombs — Texas A&M University. Professor. Developer of Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT), the most widely adopted theoretical framework for crisis-response strategy in PR practice. Coombs's textbook Ongoing Crisis Communication (now in its sixth edition) is the standard reference for crisis communications coursework.
Roxane Cohen Silver — University of California, Irvine. Distinguished Professor of Psychological Science. Her work on the psychological impact of media exposure during collective traumas (9/11, Boston Marathon bombing, school shootings) has shaped how PR practitioners understand the secondary harms of crisis-cycle media coverage and the design of crisis communications that minimize collateral psychological exposure.
Karen S. Freberg — University of Louisville. Associate Professor. Author of Social Media for Strategic Communication, the leading textbook on social media in PR practice. Her work bridges academic scholarship and active practitioner-side application — a structurally important model for the AI-era discipline that the next generation of PR scholarship will need to extend.
The Strategic Management Layer
Maureen Taylor (cited above for dialogic theory) and Tina McCorkindale — Institute for Public Relations are the primary contemporary scholars working on the strategic-management positioning of public relations inside organizational decision-making. McCorkindale's leadership at IPR has produced the largest body of empirical research on PR's strategic-management contribution since the Excellence Project itself.
The Geographic Concentration
Four universities have produced or housed the majority of canonical PR scholarship of the past forty years.
The University of Maryland College Park, through the work of James E. Grunig, Larissa A. Grunig, Elizabeth L. Toth, and Linda Childers Hon, has been the single most consequential PR scholarship institution in the United States. The Department of Communication at Maryland produced the Excellence-era theoretical core and continues to house the largest concentration of canonical PR scholarship in academic literature.
San Diego State University, through David M. Dozier and Glen M. Broom, produced the Excellence Project's empirical contribution and the world's leading PR textbook. The Glen M. Broom Center for Professional Development in Public Relations institutionalizes the legacy.
Syracuse University's Newhouse School, while less dominant in foundational theoretical scholarship, has been the leading program for the practitioner-faculty model — and the upcoming launch of Newhouse's Bachelor's in Integrative AI (Fall 2027) positions it to become the dominant institution for the next generation of communications scholarship.
The Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania, primarily through Kathleen Hall Jamieson's adjacent political-communication scholarship, has shaped how communications practitioners across PR, advertising, journalism, and public affairs think about media and democratic discourse.
The Generational Question
The Excellence-era generation of scholars is now substantially in emeritus status. James Grunig, Larissa Grunig, David Dozier, Glen Broom, Dennis Wilcox, and Elizabeth Toth are all emeritus or retired. The next generation — Coombs, Taylor, Kent, Bowen, Freberg, McCorkindale — has produced the bridge scholarship.
The 2026 question is who builds the AI-era theoretical core. The discipline's foundational theory rests on a 20th-century communication environment that the AI-era retrieval architecture has materially changed. The scholars currently positioned to produce the next-generation foundational work include those building the bridge between traditional PR scholarship and the AI Communications discipline that EPR's University GEO Gap analysis documents. The institution that produces the next Excellence-equivalent research program will likely shape PR scholarship for the following thirty years.
