Faculty & Postdoctoral affiliates
Lauren Alfrey
Lauren Alfrey is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Portland. She studies how systemic racism and gender inequality in Silicon Valley shape the design and use of digital technologies, including how common-sense ideologies about race, class, and gender difference are produced through these technologies. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University.
Iuliia Alieva
Iuliia Alieva is a 3rd year Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she works at the Center for Informed Democracy and Social Cybersecurity (IDeaS) and the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS). Her professional and academic interests are focused on research about disinformation, computational propaganda, state-funded disinformation operations, and political communication.
David Ardia
David Ardia is an Associate Professor of Law at the UNC School of Law and serves as the faculty co-director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. He also holds a secondary appointment as an Assistant professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Before joining the UNC faculty, he was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he founded and directed the Berkman Center's Digital Media Law Project.
Enrique Armijo
Enrique Armijo is the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at Elon, and an affiliate fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, teaches and researches in the areas of the First Amendment, constitutional law, torts, administrative law, media and internet law, and international freedom of expression. He is a Research Fellow with George Washington's Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics. Professor Armijo's current scholarship addresses the interaction between new technologies and free speech and has been published in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals.
Blake Atwood
Blake Atwood is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. His research and teaching focus on the intersection of technology, culture, and politics in the Middle East. He is the author of Underground: The Secret Life of Videocassettes in Iran, and Reform Cinema in Iran: Film and Political Change in the Islamic Republic.
TJ Billard
TJ Billard is an Assistant Professor and William T. Grant Scholar in the School of Communication and, by courtesy, the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. They are the founding Executive Director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies in Chicago and Editor-in-Chief of the Center’s flagship journal, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Dr Billard is the author of Voices for Transgender Equality: Making Change in the Networked Public Sphere and editor of Public Scholarship in Communication Studies.
Chad Bryant
Chad Bryant is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and adjunct professor in the Curriculum in Global Studies. He is the author of Prague: Belonging and the Modern City (Harvard University Press, 2021). A Czech translation, published by Argo, is forthcoming. Bryant is also author of Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2007), winner of the Hans Rosenberg Book Prize. He is currently embarking on a project that looks at conspiracies (real and imagined) and conspiratorial thinking in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, within a global context. He has been a CITAP affiliate for two years.
Chelsea Butkowski
Chelsea Butkowski is an Assistant Professor at American University's School of Communication. She studies how people use digital media technologies to make sense of their identities, particularly during periods of great sociopolitical change. Chelsea's work focuses on the personal politics of digital storytelling and media representation in shaping online communities.
Shanice Jones Cameron
Shanice Jones Cameron is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research areas are media studies, critical health communication, and Black feminist thought. She researches Black women's health and well-being digital networks. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from UNC-Chapel Hill.
Robyn Caplan
Robyn Caplan is a Visiting Fellow at DLI Cornell Tech, and an Assistant Professor at Duke Sanford. Researcher at Data & Society Research Institute and a founding member of the Platform Governance Research Network. She received her PhD from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She conducts research at the intersection of platform governance and media policy. Her research examines the impact of inter-and-intra-organizational behavior on platform governance and content moderation.
E. Chebrolu
E. Chebrolu is an Assistant Professor of Rhetorical Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chebrolu's research focuses on race, rhetoric, and digital media, and his current research project focuses on racial anxiety and white nationalist rhetoric on digital platforms.
Mark Coddington
Mark Coddington is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at Washington and Lee University. He studies the sociology of digital journalism, focusing on professionalism, epistemology, and organizational influence. He has published a book on news aggregation and co-authors RQ1, a newsletter on news research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Joseph Bak-Coleman
Joe B. Bak-Coleman is an associate research scholar at the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University and a computational social scientist. He earned his Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University in 2020, working with Iain Couzin and Dan Rubenstein, and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public. His research focuses on understanding how collectives make decisions in the face of uncertainty. He’s particularly interested in understanding what makes collective decision-making work and how it can go awry. Over the past decade, he has worked on collective decision-making in a range of contexts from animal groups and social media to metascience.
Stewart M. Coles
Stewart M. Coles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research examines how people develop their understanding of social issues related to identity. He is especially interested in the political effects of entertainment media and how evaluations of media's political relevance are related to how people select and respond to media content.
Eden Consenstein
Eden Consenstein is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and the Mary Noel and William M. Lamont Fellow in Religion and Media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research explores the varied intersections of conservative Christianity, capitalism, media, and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first century United States. She holds a Ph.d. in Religious Studies from Princeton University, where she also completed a certificate from the program in Media and Modernity.
Brian Creech
Brian Creech is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University. His research takes a critical look at the technology and journalism industries, with a focus on institutional power and public discourse.
Rachel Davis
Rachel Davis is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Middle Tennessee State University with expertise in critical criminology, digital sociology, gender inequalities, and sexual labor. She currently maintains two parallel research agendas concerning gendered violence and sexual labor, respectively. Her ultimate goal is to further the movement for social justice locally, nationally, and globally through education and activism.
Greg Day
Greg Day is an Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the Terry College of Business and holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Law. He is also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. His research has primarily focused on the intersection of competition, technology, innovation, and privacy as well as the disparate impact of anticompetitive conduct.
Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu
Ayse D. Lokmanoglu is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at Clemson University, and a member of the Media Forensics Hub. Her work takes a mixed methods approach that integrates computational methodologies and critical cultural theory to examine information campaigns in digital media associated with racial, gender, and religious supremacy.
Larissa Doroshenko
Larissa Doroshenko is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communication and an Affiliate Faculty in Network Science Institute, both at Northeastern University. Her computational research projects focus on "the dark side" of online media: populism, nationalism, and disinformation campaigns. She received her Ph.D. degree in Communication Arts (Political Communication) with a minor in Political Science (Comparative Politics) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Elizabeth Dubois
Elizabeth Dubois is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and a member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa. Her work examines political uses of digital media including media manipulation, citizen engagement, and artificial intelligence. She hosts the Wonks and War Rooms podcast where political communication theory meets on the ground strategy. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford.
Jennifer Dudley
Jennifer Dudley is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Columbia Business School, Management Division. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. Her research explores issues of politics, power, organizations, and culture. With Jennifer’s dissertation, she examines three potential sources of political incivility in the U.S - through the pool of potential candidates, voter preferences, or acculturation by politicians in office. Her results have implications for sociological conceptions of incivility as well as democratic discourse in the U.S. Her research uses experimental design, computational text analysis, and survey research.
Tyler Easterbrook
Tyler Easterbrook is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Idaho. His research focuses on the rhetoric of conspiracy theories and rhetorical approaches to studying digital content. Tyler received his Ph.D. in 2021 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Waqas Ejaz
Waqas Ejaz is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Oxford Climate Journalism Network. His research interests include studying digital media effects, climate change, political, and computational communication. Since his doctorate, Waqas has been working as an Assistant Professor in Pakistan, where he has looked at climate change journalism, conspiracy theories related to COVID-19, and media representations. At the Reuters Institute, he is working on an international comparative survey to understand how people consume news on climate change and its impact on a range of different attitudes.
Victoria (Tori) Smith Ekstrand
Victoria Ekstrand is an Associate Professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and is currently serving a three-year term at the UNC Graduate School as the Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education. Her research has focused on critical and interdisciplinary perspectives in media law and free expression, with research on anonymous speech, campus free expression debates, the trademarking of social movement hashtags, online accessibility issues for people with disabilities, and problems with regulating online political advertising.
Michael Eng
Michael Eng teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State University and is a faculty affiliate in the Program in Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, offering courses in data and information ethics, as well as in gender, media, and popular culture. His work deals with the intersection of aesthetics and politics from the standpoint of the philosophy of race and gender.
Saba Eskandarian
Saba Eskandarian is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on cryptography, privacy, and security. He is particularly interested in privacy and accountability in messaging systems. Previously, he completed his PhD in the Applied Cryptography group at Stanford University, where he was advised by Dan Boneh.
Melanie Feinberg
Melanie Feinberg is an Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at UNC-Chapel Hill. Melanie is a classificationist: she studies the selection, description, and arrangement of collections of things. Or, put another way, Melanie studies the design and implementation of datasets. Melanie's book, Everyday Adventures in Unruly Data, was published in October 2022 from MIT Press.
Jennifer Forestal
Jennifer Forestal is the Helen Houlahan Rigali Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. She is a political theorist whose research examines the relationship between digital technologies and democratic politics; she has written on topics like platform design and governance, digital culture, and misinformation. Her book, Designing for Democracy: How to Build Community in Digital Environments (Oxford University Press, 2022), won the 2023 APSA STEP section's Don K. Price Award for Best Book on Science, Technology, and Politics.
Aakash Gautam
Ashkash Gautam is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at San Francisco State University. He is interested in designing socio-technical systems to realize an inclusive and just society, with research ranging across human-computer interaction (HCI), learning sciences, and community-based participatory action research. He completed his Ph.D. at Virginia Tech where he was a member of ThirdLab.
Anna Gibson
Anna D. Gibson researches the role of digital communication technologies and platforms in social and civic life. She recently received her PhD from the Department of Communication at Stanford University in 2022 and currently works as a Postdoctoral Associate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Comparative Media Studies/ Writing. Her interdisciplinary approach is informed theoretically by the sociology of labor, organizational studies, and STS.
Michael Goodyear
Michael Goodyear is an Acting Assistant Professor at NYU Law. He is also a Fellow at NYU Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, an Edison Fellow at the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School, and a Fellow at the Universita degli Studi di Milano's Information Society Law Center. Michael’s research analyzes the potential of copyright and trademark law to spark and stymie technological and cultural change. He also studies the impact of copyright and trademark law on underrepresented populations, especially the LGBTQ+ community. His work has been published or is forthcoming in over a dozen academic journals, including the University of Illinois Law Review, Stanford Law Review Online, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, and Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law. He received his J.D., cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School, and his B.A., with honors, from the University of Chicago.
Blake Hallinan
Blake Hallinan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and affiliated with the ERC-funded DigitalValues project directed by Prof. Limor Shifman. They study the politics of classification on digital platforms and their current research investigates how users make sense of and contest algorithmic governance.
Colin Henry
Colin Henry is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at Vanderbilt University. He will be starting a one-year post-doc in an online extremism lab at George Washington University in the 2023-2024 academic year. Henry's dissertation work examines how the architecture of government on Western social media platforms radicalizes online political communities, with a particular focus on extremist movements at the intersection of race, gender, and religion.
Jennifer Hoewe
Jennifer Hoewe is an associate professor within the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Political Science. She studies media psychology and political communication. Specifically, her research program focuses on how political issues and groups of people are depicted in media content and how those depictions influence media consumers, particularly in terms of their cognitive processing, their attitudes, and their own identity. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she will be a Visiting Scholar within the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Adrian Hillman
Adrian Hillman is an Associate Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. His present research interest covers the sociology of news, and the influence of polarisation and advocacy on news dissemination. He explores how data usage is becoming increasingly important in news organizations, as data can provide insights into audience behaviour, content performance, and trends in the news.
Jessie Barton Hronesova
Jessie Barton Hronesova is an incoming lecturer in political sociology at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, beginning September 2023. She is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, funded by the European Union. From April to September 2023, she is a visiting fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her general research interests are in democratic backsliding, memory, transitional justice, post-war reconstruction and the rule of law in post-war and transitional contexts.
Paul Elliot Johnson
Paul Elliott Johnson is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. His first book, I the People: The Rhetoric of Conservative Populism in the United States (University of Alabama, 2022) is a comprehensive study of the how conservative political discourse defines and utilizes the idea of 'the people,' particularly towards anti-social and catastrophic ends, with consequences rooted in its misogynistic and racist understanding of the concept of freedom. His work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Women's Studies in Communication, numerous edited volumes, and at Talking Points Memo.
Bente Kalsnes
Bente Kalsnes is Professor of Political Communication at the Department of Communication, Kristiania University College. Her research interests include political communication, social media, disinformation, platform power. She is founding member of the research project Source Criticism and Mediated Disinformation (SCAM) financed by the Norwegian Research Council. Kalsnes has been a member of the Freedom of Speech Commission, as well as a member of a Nordic think tank. She is the author of a book about fake news and disinformation in a Norwegian context (Falske nyheter: Løgn, desinformasjon og propaganda i den digitale offentligheten, Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2019). She received her PhD at the University of Oslo.
Sandip Kana
Sandip Kana received his PhD in History from King’s College London. Sandip is the recipient of an award from KCL's Enhancing Education Fund for the design of a 'Decolonised' Digital Journal. Sandip carried out research into the salt tax in India, which involved photographing revenue commissioner reports on the open shelves at LSE. He is an IHR Peter Marshall Fellow, an Early Career Member of the Royal Historical Society, and a Royal Asiatic Society Fellow.
Bayan Khosravi
Bayan Khosravi received her Ph.D. in Information Technology Management from Allameh Tabataba’i University in 2019. Bayan’s research has been published in Telecommunications Policy and Digital Policy, Regulation and Governance, among others. Her research is inspired by the idea that the academic world has to play an important role in guiding policy and ensuring the well-being of all members of society. Her approach centers on understanding the imbrications of technology and policy, especially on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of various stakeholders in digital innovation.
Allison Koh
Allison Koh is a Research Associate at the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London. She recently defended her PhD at the Hertie School’s Centre for International Security in Berlin. Her dissertation research focused on how pro-government actors from authoritarian regimes can leverage the vulnerabilities of social media to influence transnational information flows, even on platforms where their governments do not have direct provision over content moderation. More broadly, Koh's interests include computational methods, online disinformation, transnational repression, and coercive power dynamics on social media.
Rachel Kuo
Rachel Kuo is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. She writes, teaches, and researches race, social movements, and digital technology. Previously, she was a 2020-22 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life and 2021-22 Visiting Scholar at Duke University's Asian American and Diasporic Studies program and Siegel Endowment Research Fellow. She has a Ph.D. and MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, and a BA in Journalism from the University of Missouri.
Martin Kwan
Martin Kwan is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Hong Kong’s Asian Institute of International Financial Law, and a 2022-2023 Associate in Research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His transnational research focuses on law, tech and policy.
David Levine
David S. Levine is a Professor of Law at Elon University School of Law and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. Dave was a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy from 2014-2017. Dave has been published in leading law reviews on issues involving technology, information law, trade secrecy and accountability, and is co-author of Information Law, Governance, and Cybersecurity (West 2019). He is also the founder and host of Hearsay Culture on KZSU-FM (Stanford University), an information policy, intellectual property law and technology talk show for which he has recorded over 280 interviews since May 2006. Hearsay Culture, which is being relaunched as the expanded Hearsay Culture Network in 2023, was named as a top five podcast in the ABA's Blawg 100 of 2008.
Andrea Lorenz
Andrea Lorenz is an assistant professor of journalism at Kent State University. Her research interests include local news and democracy, political communication at the state and local level, and women in journalism and politics. She is a former journalist and holds a BA in International Studies from American University, an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri, and a Ph.D. from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Shuning Lu
Shuning Lu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at North Dakota State University. She studies how news audiences engage with news content, news workers, other audience members, and news algorithms in the digital media environment. She received her Ph.D. in Journalism from The University of Texas at Austin.
Josephine (Jo) Lukito
Jo Lukito is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. She is also the Director of the Media & Democracy Data Cooperative and a Senior Faculty Research Affiliate for the Center for Media Engagement. Jo uses mixed methods and computational approaches to study political language in the information ecology, focusing especially on harmful digital content (e.g., mis/disinformation, hate speech) across multiple platforms.
Cindy Ma
Cindy Ma is an incoming Lecturer of Race and Media at the University of Leeds. Her research examines how sociotechnical systems, political discourse, and racial inequity intersect.
Jessica Maddox
Jessica Maddox is an assistant professor of digital media technology at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the intersection of culture, social media platforms, and the tech industry, and how the experiences of influencers and content creators reveal systemic inequalities and power imbalances for marginalized users.
Jessica Mahone
Jessica Mahone is the Research Director of the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media (CISLM) at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Prior to joining CISLM, she has held research and evaluation positions at Report for America, the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy at Duke University, Democracy Fund, and Pew Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in mass communication, specializing in political communication, from the University of Florida, M.A. degrees in communication and sociology from East Tennessee State University, and a B.A. in religion from King College.
Pranav Malhotra
Pranav Malhotra is an incoming Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. His research examines how cultural and relational norms intersect with the affordances of social and mobile media to impact how people engage with information and each other. His work has been published in Social Media+Society, Journal of Computer-mediated Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Digital Journalism.
Meghan Manfra
Meghan Manfra is a Professor in the College of Education at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the integration of technology in secondary social studies classrooms and action research as a professional development tool for teachers. She is the author of Action Research for Classroom, Schools, and Communities and editor of the Handbook of Social Studies Research.
Kira Marshall-McKelvey
Kira Marshall-McKelvey (she/her/hers) is a Communication Studies scholar at Syracuse University. Her work examines women influencer visibility and labor in feminized spaces. She looks at the transgressive possibilities in seemingly apolitical spaces, namely the beauty and lifestyle community. She received her Ph.D. in Communication Studies at Colorado State University.
Lee McGuigan
Lee McGuigan is an Assistant Professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. He studies the history and political economy of advertising, media, and information technology. His book, Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech, will be published by MIT Press in 2023.
Aidan Moir
Aidan Moir is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor. Her research analyzes the relationship between legacy and social media on the circulation of iconic identities in popular culture. Her current research analyzes the intersections of strategic communication and digital advocacy for political campaigning, influencers, and corporate brands in mediating iconic promotional performances on social media.
Ruth Moon
Ruth Moon is an assistant professor of media and public affairs at Louisiana State University. She studies power relationships and knowledge production with a focus on communication processes and journalistic practice in the Global South. She has published research in Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies, Journalism, Information, Communication & Society, and International Journal of Communication. Her first book, Authoritarian Journalism: Controlling the Press in Post-Conflict Rwanda, is in production with Oxford University Press. Her research is informed by more than 10 years’ professional experience working as a reporter and editor for magazines and newspapers in the U.S.
Rachel Moran
Rachel Moran is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) at the University of Washington. Her research explores the role of trust in digital information environments and is particularly concerned with how trust is implicated in the spread of mis- and dis-information. Rachel received her Ph.D. degree from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
David Morar
David Morar is a Senior Policy Analyst with New America’s Open Technology Institute, a visiting scholar at the Schar School of Policy and Government, and a Fellow at the Digital Interests Lab. He is a researcher and public policy professional, a three time ICANN Fellow, who has done work throughout the spectrum of technology policy issues, both nationally and internationally, from privacy and open data to ethics and content issues.
Ashley Muddiman
Ashley Muddiman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, as well as a Faculty Research Associate with the Center for Media Engagement. Her research explores media effects, specifically those related to digital politics and political incivility. She also enjoys using innovative methods to address the challenges of studying social media content. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Iva Nenadić
Iva Nenadić is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom. She studies media pluralism in the context of content curation, ranking and moderation policies of online platforms, democratic implications such policies may have, and related regulatory interventions.
Aspriadis Neofytos
Aspriadis Neofytos is an Adjunct Lecturer of Strategic Communication in the Department of Museum Studies at the University of Patras. His research interests are in strategic communication, crisis management and communications, nation branding, public diplomacy, strategy, information warfare, psychological operations, fake news, disinformation, character assassination, and rhetoric. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of International and European Studies of the University of Piraeus.
Gabriel Nicholas
Gabriel Nicholas is a Research Fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology where his research focuses on automated content moderation and data governance. He is also a joint fellow at the NYU School of Law Information Law Institute and the NYU Center for Cybersecurity. He holds a MA in Information Management and Systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information.
Luise Papcke
Luise Papckeis currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. A political theorist by training, she received her Ph.D. from Columbia and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at NYU School of Law. In her research, she draws from the history of political thought to analyze the nature and dynamics of nascent digital subjectivity and the challenges it poses to ‘traditional’ liberal democratic ideas about individuality and individual autonomy.
Sharrona Pearl
Sharrona Pearl is Associate Professor of Bioethics and History at Drexel University. Her forthcoming book "Do I know you? From face blindness to super recognition" is the third in her face trilogy. She also has a book under contract on "The Mask" with Bloomsbury Academic. She has published widely on Victorian history of medicine, media and religion, apologies and forgiveness, plastic surgery, and faces more broadly. Pearl maintains an active freelance profile with bylines in The Washington Post, Real Life Mag, Lilith, and a variety of other sites.
Shanetta Pendleton
Shanetta Pendleton is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Media's doctoral program, and will join the faculty at Elon University as an Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication in fall of 2023. Her research is centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy, society, and in the public relations industry. Shanetta’s current research focuses on pedagogy, digital activism, corporate socio-political activism, and relationship management through social media.
Matt Perault
Matt Perault is the director of the Center on Technology Policy (CTP), a professor of the practice at UNC's School of Information & Library Science, and a consultant on technology policy issues. He previously led the Center on Science & Technology Policy at Duke University and was a professor of the practice at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy. Matt holds a law degree from Harvard Law School, a master's degree in Public Policy from Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy, and a bachelor's degree in political science from Brown University.
Jonathan Peters
Jonathan Peters is the chair of the Department of Journalism in the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where he also has a faculty appointment in the School of Law. His research focuses on First Amendment and media law, and his work has appeared in journals published by the law schools at Harvard, Berkeley, NYU, Virginia, and North Carolina, among others. He is a member of the Panel of Experts on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association, which is part of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). His contributions to the Panel focus on digitally-mediated assemblies and press rights at protests.
Caitlin Petre
Caitlin Petre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her work uses qualitative methods to examine the social processes, organizations, and actors behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern the contemporary workplace. Petre's book, All the News That's Fit to Click, is a behind-the-scenes look at how performance analytics are transforming the work of journalism, from the New York Times to Gawker Media.
Pawel Popiel
Pawel Popiel is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Media, Inequality and Change (MIC) Center. His research focuses on the politics of regulating digital platforms, particularly around competition, data, and infrastructure. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Justin Pottle
Justin Pottle is a political theorist and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. His research explores the intersections of democratic theory and social epistemology, with a focus on how racial, political, and economic inequality affect what citizens learn about politics.
J. Clark Powers
J. Clark Powers is an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Maynooth University. His work concerns the development and teaching of interdisciplinary methodology for practical, pragmatic social research in contemporary mediatized societies. He is a co-founder and active member of the Interdisciplinary Digital Research Group at Dublin City University. Clark has 20 years of continuing experience as a communications practitioner in the international security and disarmament space.
Meredith L. Pruden
Meredith L. Pruden is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Kennesaw State University, as well as a Fellow with Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. Meredith earned her PhD in Communication and certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow with the Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative. Meredith’s interdisciplinary, methodologically agnostic research is rooted in feminist media studies and explores supremacisms and far-right media and politics, including the mis/disinformation and conspiracism circulated by these groups across platforms and channels.
Vignesh Rajahmani
Vignesh Rajahmani holds a PhD in Politics and Public Policy from King’s India Institute, King's College London. With a multidisciplinary background encompassing political science, sociology, and business studies, Vignesh brings over 5 years of professional experience in public policy, legislative research, and political consulting. His research focuses on the multi-pronged impact of social media on shaping societal common sense, voter behaviour, and democratic and electoral outcomes in the Global South. Specifically, Vignesh examines the intricate dynamics of social media networks, particularly the influential heavy tweeters on Twitter, who possess the ability to shape the digital public sphere in India.
Elizabeth Ramsey
Elizabeth Ramsey is an associate professor and librarian at Boise State University’s Albertsons Library. She is the liaison to programs in the School of Public Service, the School of the Environment, and the Center for Global Education. Among her research interests are critical information literacy, libraries and civic engagement, and outreach to underrepresented students in higher education.
Madhavi Reddi
Madhavi Reddi is an assistant professor of mass communication at York College of Pennsylvania. Her research explores identity and representation through the lens of entertainment media, art, and politics.
Amanda Reid
Amanda Reid is an Associate Professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, an adjunct professor at the UNC School of Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy. Her interdisciplinary legal scholarship focuses on the intersection of law, technology, and society, with particular emphasis on the First Amendment, intellectual property, and privacy.
Martin Riedl
Martin Riedl is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research investigates platform governance and content moderation, digital journalism, as well as the spread of false and misleading information on social media.
Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat
Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat is a Principal Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. He teaches and researches the politics of Media Technologies and Industries, with particular attention to how they shape the conditions for social communicative interactions.
Erkan Saka
Erkan Saka is a professor of media and journalism studies in the Media Department at Istanbul Bilgi University. He is the author of "Social Media and Politics in Turkey", "A Journey through Citizen Journalism, Political Trolling, and Fake News", and "Big Data and gender-biased algorithms".
David Scales
David Scales is an internal medicine hospitalist and assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and Chief Medical Officer at Critica, an NGO focused on building scientific literacy. His research focuses on medical communication in clinical and online settings, including understanding how structural factors affect our information environments to allow misinformation to propagate and misconceptions to persist. Dr. Scales’ work leverages qualitative and quantitative methods to address the problem of health-related misinformation, training “infodemiologists” to build Covid-19 vaccine confidence in online communities with community-oriented motivational interviewing. Dr. Scales received his MD and PhD from Yale University, where his sociology dissertation examined how the World Health Organization seeks to control the spread of diseases across international borders. He completed a primary care Internal Medicine residency at Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Scales holds a certificate of medical interpretation in Levantine Colloquial Arabic from U. Mass Amherst and has worked with refugees in the United States and throughout the Levant.
Laura Schelenz
Laura Schelenz is a researcher at the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities, University of Tuebingen, Germany. In the past 6 years, she has worked at the Ethics Center on digitalization and technology development in Africa, Europe, and the USA. She looks at technology and society from a critical perspective, centering diversity-aware design in her research and practice.
Carly Schnitzler
Carly Schnitzler is a lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins, where her teaching and research center on digital rhetoric, creative computation, and the public humanities. She is at work on two book projects: TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies and Generations: Creative Computation, Community, and the Rhetorical Canon. She also founded and continues to co-organize If, Then: Technology and Poetics with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, a community working group and event series promoting inclusivity and skills-building in creative computation for artists, scholars, and teachers. Before coming to Hopkins, Carly taught writing and literature courses at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she received her Ph.D.
Jared Schroeder
Jared Schroeder is an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where his research focuses on freedom of expression and emerging technologies. His research considers how we should understand and rationalize freedom of expression in an era defined by difficult questions about artificial intelligence, the flow of information, and questions concerning platform regulation. Schroeder is the author of The Press Clause and Digital Technology's Fourth Wave and co-author of Emma Goldman's No-Conscription League and the First Amendment.
Christian Schwarzenegger
Christian Schwarzenegger is serving as a temporary professor in Communication and Media Studies with a focus on Media Society at the Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. Christian Schwarzenegger is on leave from his position as Akademischer Oberrat at the Department of Media, Knowledge and Communication at the University of Augsburg. He currently leads the DFG-funded research project "Alternative Media - Alternative Publics - Alternative Realities? Users and usage patterns of system-critical alternative media and their significance in the media repertoire over time" (2021-2024).
Aaron Shapiro
Aaron Shapiro is assistant professor of technology studies in the Department of Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill. His current research is a study of the cultural and moral economies of subscription.
Sarah Singer
Sarah Singer is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Central Florida, where she teaches courses on the rhetorics of public debate, effective collaboration, and plain language communication. She studies the rhetoric of patient empowerment, medical mis/disinformation, and critical health literacy. Sarah's current projects investigate how arguments shape patients' experiences with Lyme disease and Long COVID.
Christopher Terry
Christopher Terry received his Ph.D. from UW-Madison in 2012. He spent 15 years as a producer in commercial radio, and his research agenda includes regulatory and legal analysis of media ownership, internet policy and political advertising. Terry served for six years as a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before becoming joining University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication in the Fall of 2016.
Tanja Thomas
Tanja Thomas is Professor of media studies with a focus on transformations in media culture at Tübingen University. Throughout her carrier, she has worked extensively on socially relevant and very topical issues in the field of media and communication studies including racism, sexism, the representation of right-wing populism and violence in Germany, political protest in Germany and Israel as well as questions of collective memories in and through media.
Scott Timcke
Scott Timcke is a political economist of digital technology and democratic life. He is a Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change. Previously he held a LUCAS-LAHRI Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds’ Centre for African Studies and was a Tenure Track Lecturer in Communication Studies at The University of The West Indies, St. Augustine. His second book, Algorithms and The End of Politics, was released in February 2021 and his third book, The Political Economy of Fortune and Misfortune: Prospects for Prosperity in Our Times, was released in March 2023.
Giuliana Sorce
Giuliana Sorce researches digital media and society with a specialization in activism and social movements. She studies cultural and political issues including right-wing populism, climate change, gender equity, and social justice from a qualitative perspective. Her habilitation project focuses on transnational youth climate activism.
Jeffrey Treem
Jeffrey W. Treem is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, where he is part of the Organizational Communication & Technology group. His work explores how the material affordances of communication technologies affect attributions of knowledge.
Chuck Tryon
Chuck Tryon is a professor of English at Fayetteville State University. He has written three books, Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence, On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies, and Political TV. He has also published articles in Media Industries Journal, Media Culture and Society, Screen, and The Journal of Film and Video.
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and the Robertson professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He directs the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. Vaidhyanathan is a permanent columnist at The Guardian and Slate; he is also a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Slate, and The Baffler.
Lauren Valentino
Lauren Valentino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Trained as a sociologist of culture and cognition, she uses a mix of methods to document how Americans understand and misunderstand social inequality, with implications for political attitudes, health and well-being, and occupational and educational outcomes. Her latest work is focused on empowering people to combat and confront mis- and dis-information about inequality in their everyday lives. She earned her PhD in Sociology from Duke University and was previously a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics.
Suzanne van Geuns
Suzanne van Geuns is a second-year postdoctoral research associate at Princeton's Center for Culture, Society, and Religion. Her scholarship examines the intellectual exchange between computational projects and the gendered or sexual imagination, with her most recent project focusing on artificial intelligence research as it appears in heterosexual seduction advice. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto, where she was a fellow at the Schwartz-Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
Fabian Virchow
Fabian Virchow is a political scientist and sociologist with a long history in researching racism, antisemitism, and the radical right - its history, worldview and political performance, including violence and terrorism. He is also investigating how right-wing/white supremacist violence is remembered. Further research is in protest and social movements, particularly how they make use of digital media.
Photini Vrikki
Photini Vrikki is a Lecturer in Digital Methods in the Humanities at the Department of Information Studies at University College London. Her research focuses on the links between social and digital inequalities; power and data; and algorithmic cultural developments. In her work, she examines the integration of technology into our lives by exploring the socio-cultural opportunities of data while conveying their humanities challenges.
Morgan Wack
Morgan Wack is an Assistant Research Professor at Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub. His research is focused on the influence of new technologies in autocracies and nascent democracies. Current projects revolve around the use of synthetic media to distort elections and the efficacy of interventions aimed at countering the influence of misinformation.
Kaitlin Stack Whitney
Kaitlin Stack Whitney is an assistant professor in the Science, Technology & Society Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. She holds a PhD in Zoology with a minor in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research explores intersections of technology with biodiversity, such as how community science moving mostly online has shaped who participates and how museums are (or are not) including disability as biological diversity in their missions and messaging.
Tamar Wilner
Tamar Wilner is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, where she works on Co-Designing for Trust, a National Science Foundation-funded project that draws on workshops with teachers, librarians, and community members to develop initiatives to tackle the misinformation crisis. Her research interests include news literacy, misinformation, media trust, and the research-practitioner gap in journalism. She earned her Ph.D. in Journalism and Media from the University of Texas at Austin.
Heather Suzanne Woods
Heather Suzanne Woods Heather Suzanne Woods is a scholar and researcher of digital rhetoric. Her areas of expertise include memes, virtual assistants Siri and Alexa, online activism and social media, and smart homes. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Communication Studies at Kansas State University. She is author of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right with Leslie Hahner.
Alex Worsnip
Alex Worsnip is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Applied Epistemology Project at UNC Chapel Hill. His research interests are primarily in epistemology and the theory of rationality, with particular recent attention to applied and political epistemology. He has published on topics such as the epistemology of media consumption, the epistemology of climate change denial, and political disagreement.
Shan Xu
Shan Xu is an Assistant Professor of Public Relations & Strategic Communication Management at Texas Tech University. Her interests include how people make media choices and how that influences their physical health and psychological well-being. She publishes in journals in communication and cross disciplines, such as Health Communication and Computers in Human Behavior, and has won research awards and grants.
Lauren Zentz
Lauren Zentz specializes in the study of language socialization in contexts of online communication, political activism and news media, and the relation of such language use to nationalism, politics, and identity work. Her recent work takes an interest in how political activists and members of the news media make use of social media platforms in constructing individual and group identities, forming sociopolitical movements, and conveying news events.
Xinyan (Eva) Zhao
Eva Zhao is an assistant professor at UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Her research focuses on computational strategic communication and examines social media information acquisition, processing, and diffusion surrounding crisis, risk, and health topics.
Guido Zurstiege
Guido Zurstiege is a Professor at the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research has been centered on vulnerable audiences, with studies on preventing childhood obesity through serious games, public health campaigns, and parental mediation. Currently, he focuses on exploring forms of and motivations for digital disconnection.