Cori E. Dauber

Associate Professor
Rhetorical Studies

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 has covered the war in Iraq and the War on Terror, and the way various terrorist and insurgent groups have successfully manipulated that coverage.  This varies from controlling the narrative frame through which the press views particular events, to actually staging deception operations the press has fallen for, to the fact that terrorist acts are themselves events designed and crafted with media coverage in mind.

Her most recent publication, “Real Time War, Real Time Critique,” was a chapter in a multi-volume study of military culture published by Praeger (Military Life: The Psychology of Serving in Peace and Combat, 2005) analyzing the influence of milblogs and the fact that these wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, are being fought in a radically different media environment from any that have come before.  (Her own blog, Rantingprofs.com analyzes media coverage of the War on Terror, and has a small but loyal audience.)  She is currently working on a White Paper on the press coverage of Katrina before returning to her work on media and terrorism, beginning with a critique of the way the networks cover terrorist attacks in Iraq which result in American casualties.

She teaches Press Coverage of the War on Terror, Political Rhetoric of 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, and speaks regularly to a variety of programs at the Canadian Forces College.