Peter Simonson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is broadly interested in historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches to rhetoric and mass media, and focuses especially on the U.S. since the 1850s. His research cuts across a number of areas, including the intellectual history of communication, rhetorical and mass communication theory, pragmatism, rhetoric and religion, ethnographic approaches to rhetorical studies, communication and community, the history of the field of communication, and the work of Robert K. Merton. Simonson came to the University of Colorado after teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and Allegheny College. He took his doctorate at the University of Iowa, where he worked with John Durham Peters and the late, great Ken Cmiel. Before graduate work in communication studies, he took undergraduate and Masters degrees in philosophy and comparative religion at Stanford University.