Cori E. Dauber

B.A. and Ph.D., Northwestern University; M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rhetorical Studies. Dr. Dauber’s research focuses on terrorist and insurgent media and information strategies (particularly their attempts to manipulate the Western press) and their use of “new media” and the Internet, the development of effective responses to those strategies, and press coverage of war and terrorism.

Dr. Dauber’s current research focuses on the nexus between the way the press covers war, the military, and terrorism, and the way terrorism functions as a media event.  Specifically, she is working on the way the press covers the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat of terrorism, and terrorist attacks, and the way terrorist and insurgent groups have successfully manipulated that coverage.  This varies from controlling the narrative frame through which the press views particular events, to staging hoaxes and successfully getting the press to report on events that never happened, to the fact that terrorist acts are themselves events designed and crafted with media coverage in mind.

Her most recent publication, “The Truth Is Out There: Responding to Insurgent Deception Operations,” (Military Review, January/February 2009) reports on a series of hoaxes insurgents in Iraq played on the Western press, getting them to report events that did not actually happen. Many of the hoaxes are disclosed in her article for the first time. She is currently working on the importance of visual imagery to insurgencies, and the role imagery plays in terrorism.

Dr. Dauber is currently the Visiting Research Scholar at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. When on campus, she teaches Terrorism and Media, Presidential Rhetoric and September 11th, and a broad survey course on Terrorism and Political Violence as a lower division undergraduate course.

Dr. Dauber has received the American Forensic Association Research Award, UNC’s Hettelman Award for Young Faculty, the Chapman Family Faculty Fellowship, and a variety of competitive grants from the Armed Services in support of her research.

She is very active with World View, the campus office which brings K-12 and community college teachers and administrators who are seeking ways to integrate international issues into their curricula to campus so that they can use UNC faculty as a resource.  World View runs a variety of programs each year organized thematically, but typically Dauber is used to speak to the teachers about the use of news media and internet sources in teaching international issues. 

She is also active in the tri-university research consortium of national security faculty, bringing together the faculty interested in national security issues from Duke, UNC, and State, the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. Indeed, she was TISS’s first named Research Fellow. That organization has periodically sought to make faculty a resource on issues pertaining to terrorism for area first responders, and she has been active in that effort.

On campus, Dauber is a member of the Executive Committee of the Curriculum on Peace, War, and Defense, the committee which oversees the interdisciplinary undergraduate major focusing on security related issues.  (Several of her courses are cross-listed with the Curriculum.)  She has been very active in the Curriculum in a variety of ways, including serving as Acting Chair on several occasions.

Dauber also speaks about her research on a regular basis to non-academic professional audiences, and has spoken to the National Defense University, the US Army War College, the Kennedy Center for Special Warfare, the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, and speaks regularly to a variety of programs at the Canadian Forces College.