Academic Work

I have recently completed my Doctorate of Strategic Communication (DSC) at Regent University (2024). I  also hold a Master of Arts in Journalism (2009) from Regent and a Master of Arts in History (2006) from the University of Scranton. I possess a dual Bachelor of Arts degree in Italian and French (2003) from the University of Scranton. 

As a strategic communicator, my main interest is how humans communicate with people from different cultures and how intercultural communication can be improved. 

My paper, Hashtags and heritage: The use of #italianamerican on Instagram, used both framing theory and Collier’s cultural identity theory to study the use of #italianamerican on Instagram by first attempting to determine if it was used exclusively by Italian Americans as a way to demonstrate their own cultural identity. I then examined whether the message frame of posts using #italianamerican demonstrated users’ personal perceptions of Italian American culture and, finally, I studied if there was a relationship between #italianamerican posters’ ethnicity and the message frame of their posts. This paper received the first-place award in the Multicultural division for a debut paper at the 2023 Broadcast Education Association conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. I was also named a Radio Advertising Bureau Student Scholar for the same conference.

For my dissertation, Passing the Flame: Place Branding, Destination Marketing, and Ancestral Travel,  I wanted to somehow incorporate my interest in intercultural communication with my ongoing study of European-American ethnic groups. Passing the Flame is a study of European Americans whose families came to the United States at least two generations ago and who are seeking a connection to their respective ancestral homelands through travel. I chose this topic for a very personal reason: my grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1927 and, as a proud Italian American who has traveled to Italy several times, I wanted to examine how other American ancestral travelers responded to marketing efforts to entice them to visit their European ancestral homelands. This quantitative study took the form of a survey that was disseminated to various European American social groups and organizations. The total number of respondents for the survey was 1,243 and, after cleaning the data, the number of usable responses was 735. The results of this study led to the creation of a new subfield of destination marketing called Ancestral Homeland Marketing, as well as defining the ancestral traveler as a new kind of place consumer. This study also led to the creation of the Ancestral Homeland Marketing Scale (AHMS), which can be used for additional research, including the study of other American ethnic groups.

Selected survey results demonstrate that people’s ethnic origin plays a role in their decision to visit their ancestral homelands. For example, 94.7% (n = 695) of survey respondents replied that they would travel to their ancestral homelands when taking only their ethnicity into account as a deciding factor to visit. Furthermore, 97.1% (n = 715) of survey respondents replied that they desired to travel to their ancestral homelands based on ethnicity alone. Ancestral travelers first identify with the country and culture of their family’s ancestral homeland, which helps inform their overall social identity as ethnic Americans. This overall social identity then informs their decision to visit their ancestral homeland as an ancestral traveler. 

My full dissertation is available at this link.

Besides intercultural communication, I am also interested in the following topics:

• The Metaverse
• Artificial intelligence
• Crisis communication
• Virtual reality
• Workplace communication
• Communication in remote-based workplaces
• Communication in online classrooms
• Gender and communication, especially in the workplace
• Digital Media
• Social Media

For more information, please connect with me on Academia.edu by clicking here.