Assistant Professor - Media Psychology

Job Summary

The Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) seeks to hire a full-time, tenure-track assistant professor to teach and conduct research in media psychology, to begin August 25, 2027.

Job duties include research activity, teaching of graduate and undergraduate courses, mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students, and service to the department, school, university, and profession.

A PhD by the start of the appointment is required.

The preferred candidate will demonstrate an innovative research agenda that advances the understanding of media psychology (i.e., uses, processes and effects) at the individual, community, and/or societal level.

We are particularly interested in applicants who use innovative methods and approaches in their research and teaching, including experiments, surveys, content analysis, meta-analysis, computational methods, psycho-physiological methods, neuroimaging or other social scientific techniques. Scholars utilizing a range of methods, and/or who supplement quantitative methods with qualitative approaches, are welcome.

The ideal candidate will provide graduate and undergraduate students with the theoretical and methodological foundations to explore how individuals and groups of people interact with, and are affected by, mediated communication. This may include the processes and effects of media use in relation to a person's identity, attention, stage of development, or other contextual factors; choices for exposure; and how people's emotions, cognition and perceptions interact with media-both as recipients and as active users.

All areas of media psychology will be considered. This could include scholarship on media choice; psychological antecedents and consequences of media use; representations of gender and/or sexuality and their consequences; representations of race and ethnicity and their consequences; media uses and effects among members of understudied and/or marginalized groups; media uses and effects through the life course; media effects on health, risk, and environmental behavior;

media effects on cognitive processing and learning; media and children; media and well-being; new and emerging media (e.g., social media, virtual reality, AI, etc.).

Positions that are eligible for hybrid or mobile/remote work mode are at the discretion of the hiring department. Work agreements are reviewed annually at a minimum and are subject to change at any time, and for any reason, throughout the course of employment. Learn more about the work modes.

The University of Michigan conducts background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer and may use a third party administrator to conduct background checks. Background checks are performed in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Review of dossiers will begin on September 15, 2026; applications received after September 11, 2026 may not receive full consideration.

The University of Michigan is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants, including protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.