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University of Florida

New Faculty Rebecca Frazer

Assistant Professor, Public Relations Department

Read Rebecca Frazer’s hiring announcement.

Rebecca Frazer
Rebecca Frazer

What are you teaching in fall 2023?

I am teaching Global Social Change Communications.

What is your area of expertise?

Mass media psychology and persuasive communication.

What research are you working on?

I’m currently working on multiple projects about how audiences perceive characters or real people in story-form media, specifically in regards to perceptions of uniqueness and complexity. Understanding how audiences evaluate characters and real people in stories has important implications for the societal impact of story-based entertainment, news and public campaign messages. I’m also currently working on a project on the effectiveness of moral appeals in counter-extremism persuasion.

What excites you most about coming to Gainesville?

I’m excited to explore Florida and spend some time at the beach! I’m also excited to wear shorts in January, which will be a brand new experience for me (as a lifelong Midwesterner).

What accomplishments, personal or professional, are you most proud of?

I’m proud to have won Ohio State’s university-wide graduate student teaching award in 2022. I value teaching and investing in my students, so this award was very meaningful to me.

I have a co-first-authored piece in New Media & Society, which examines Americans’ moral evaluations of social media posts by anti-COVID vaccination individuals who went on to die of the virus. Although the subject matter is very sobering, I think our work reveals some fascinating and socially-important trends in how Americans responded to the deaths of others from COVID-19. I’m also really proud of this piece because my co-authors had to work incredibly fast to design the study, procure funding and collect the data while the COVID-19 Delta wave was still occurring (fall of 2021). It’s the fastest I have ever gotten a study off the ground, and the meaningful results we found made me really proud of our efforts to run this study.

What three things don’t we know about you?

  1. I grew up in the middle of the woods in very rural Indiana—I couldn’t see another house from my house.
  2. I won the amateur women’s disc golf world championships in 2010 (at the age of 15).
  3. I love to swim in any body of water, and I have swum in all 5 great lakes.