Jennifer Hoewe

Education

Ph.D., Penn State University
M.A., Michigan State University
B.A., Grand Valley State University

BIO

Dr. Hoewe’s research program falls at the intersection of political communication and media psychology. She studies how and why people consume media content, how they cognitively process media content, and the effects that media content has on them, particularly in political contexts.

Dr. Hoewe is the Associate Director of the Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology (CAPT). Additionally, she is also Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Purdue Research in Media Effects (PRIME) Lab (an affiliated lab with CAPT). She currently serves on the Advisory Committee for the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship & Engagement (CCSE), and she is the former Head of the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

Dr. Hoewe has published more than 50 refereed journal articles and book chapters. Her research has been published in Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Media Psychology, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, among others. Her book, Enjoyment is Breaking News, will be published by The MIT Press in September 2026. It discusses how the news environment has evolved in recent decades and explains the impact of those changes on news consumers, concluding with recommendations for journalists and the public moving forward.

In 2026, Dr. Hoewe was named a University Faculty Scholar, which is a designation for outstanding mid-career faculty at Purdue. She was named a Redding Faculty Fellow within the Lamb School in 2026 in recognition of her research productivity and impact. In 2025, she received the Early Career Award from the J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox Graduate School at Penn State University, which recognizes the top graduate from the past 10 years. Her recent publication on information literacy was named a Top 20 Article of 2024 by the Library Instruction Round Table of the American Library Association. Additionally, The Arts Federation, which is the arts council that includes 14 counties in Indiana, selected her for the Outstanding Instructor Award in 2024. She was awarded the W. Charles Redding Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Lamb School in 2022. In 2021, she received the Excellence in Discovery and Creative Endeavors (EIDCE) Award from Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts, which is the College’s highest recognition for scholarly achievement. She received the Promising Professor Award from the Mass Communication and Society Division of AEJMC in 2020, which is given for excellence and innovation in teaching. Also, her co-authored work published in Science Communication received the AEJMC Science, Health, Environment and Risk Communication (ComSHER) Article of the Year Award in 2017.

While a doctoral student at Penn State, she received the University Graduate Fellowship, the Excellence in Communication Doctoral Award, which is awarded to the most successful Ph.D. student in the College, and the Davis Award for commitment to ethical academic work. She earned her master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University, where she was recognized as the Outstanding Graduate Student. She completed her undergraduate work at Grand Valley State University, where she received the I Am Grand Valley Leadership Award. Prior to her career in academia, Dr. Hoewe worked as a journalist and a press assistant for a member of Congress.