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Wilbur Schramm
American writer, journalist, scholar (1907-1987) · United States · On the map · Writers · Died at 80
Wilbur Lang Schramm was an American scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1936 and served as its first director until 1941.
Wilbur Schramm is read about 32 times a day, in 10 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 25 August 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 60 days, one point a day.
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About this person
Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars. Schramm's mass communication program in the Iowa School of Journalism was a pilot project for the doctoral program and for the Institute of Communications Research, which he founded in 1947 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, now housed in the UIUC College of Media. At Illinois, Wilbur Schramm set in motion the patterns of scholarly work in communication study that continue to this day.
