Dorothy "Dolly" Mullin is a Continuing Lecturer whose primary focus is teaching undergraduates. She joined the Communication Department as a faculty member in 1996, after serving many years as a Teaching Assistant at UCSB while completing her Masters and Ph.D. She specializes in the large pre-major courses in communication, particularly Introduction to Communication (Comm 1) and Communication Research Methods (Comm 88). Dr. Mullin also trains new graduate student Teaching Assistants through her seminar Teaching College Communication (Comm 500). She supervises many TAs each quarter in her classes and aims to promote excellent teaching skills among the professors of the future.

Dr. Mullin has been recognized for her teaching with an Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. She is also actively involved in UCSB’s programs to support effective teaching and improve student learning, serving on the advisory boards for the Center for Innovative Teaching, Research, and Learning (CITRAL) and the Transfer Student Center.

Dr. Mullin’s research interests center around issues that involve the media and law. She is primarily interested in “free speech” issues, particularly government attempts to regulate offensive content (such as indecency, pornography, or hate speech) in broadcast media and on the Internet. The courts and policy makers often approach media content from a different perspective than do social scientists, and she is interested in empirical tests of some of the legal reasoning.