Universidade Católica Portuguesa celebrates its National Day with an Academic Session, on February 2, at 4:00 p.m., which will take place at the Cardeal Medeiros Auditorium, in Lisbon. On this day the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa will be awarded to Professor Barbie Zelizer.

Barbie Zelizer will be distinguished in a ceremony presided over by D. Manuel Clemente, Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon and Chancellor of Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory, and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored or edited fifteen books, including the award-winning About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford, 2010) and Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998), and over 150 articles, book chapters, and essays. 

In 2020, Zelizer was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Freedom Forum Center Research Fellowship; a Fellowship from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy; a Fellowship from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; a Fulbright Senior Scholar; a Fellowship from Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and an ACLS Fellowship.

She is the co-organizer, with the Dean of FCH, Nelson Ribeiro, of the Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication hosted at the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidade Católica Portuguesa and at the Research Center for Communication and Culture. 

Coeditor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism and former Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication, she is a past President of the International Communication Association, where she is also a Fellow, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She is a former Judge of the Peabody Awards for Excellence in Electronic Media, and her work has been translated into French, Korean, Turkish, Romanian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, and Portuguese. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled How the Cold War Drives the News.