Communication and Media Faculty

Philip A. Thompsen, Ph.D. holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Communication and Media. Dr. Thompsen is a scholar of communication media and technology, with particular interests in broadcast performance He is the author of the textbook On Air: Effective Announcing (Cognella, 2019).

The most enduring theme of Dr. Thompsen's academic career has been his commitment to student media. He currently serves as faculty advisor to WCUR-FM, our campus radio station. From 2003 to 2016, he served as faculty advisor to our campus newspaper, The Quad. Dr. Thompsen previously served as faculty advisor to WCUR from 1997 to 2007, and helped the station achieve its first FM broadcasting license in 1999. He has also twice served as advisor to WCU-TV, our campus television channel (from 2000 to 2003 and from 2013 to 2015), and helped launch and advise WCU Weekly during its early years. Since 2014, Dr. Thompsen has worked with his students to produce the Weather Minute, a daily weather video that is distributed to digital signs across campus, the local Verizon Fios cable television system and a variety of social media platforms.

Throughout his career, Dr. Thompsen has been an active member of the Broadcast Education Association, an international organization of teachers and scholars of broadcasting and electronic media. He is past chair of that organization's Student Media Advisor division. Since 1985, he has regularly attended the annual convention of the Broadcast Education Association, presenting his scholarship, moderating panels, serving as a respondent and working to advance the aims of the association.

Dr. Thompsen's scholarship has been published in a variety of formats, including book chapters, journal articles, conference proceedings, convention papers, panel presentations and various online resources. Scholarly journals that have published his articles include The Electronic Journal of Communication, Computers in Human Behavior, CALICO Journal, Et Cetera: A Review of General Semantics, Feedback and The Pennsylvania Communication Annual. He has held faculty fellowships at C-SPAN in Washington, DC, The Apple Teacher Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, The Time Warner Media Lab in New York City, KYW-TV and KYW-AM in Philadelphia, PA.

In addition to West Chester University, Dr. Thompsen has taught at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Louisiana, Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, and the Ron Baile School of Broadcasting in Phoenix, Arizona. He holds a B.S. from Northern Arizona University, an M.S. from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Dr. Thompsen joined the faculty of West Chester University in 1997.

Dr. Thompsen maintains his primary blog at www.drthompsen.com. 

Dr. Thompsen's Vita