UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Administrative Associate
- Receptionist
Alice Rentz is the Receptionist in the front office of the School of Journalism and Media. She came to Moody from the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and before that was a Faculty Assistant at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. She has BAs in Government and Religious Studies from The University of Texas at Austin.
Amy Kristin Sanders is an award-winning former journalist, licensed attorney, and associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media. She is also an associate professor of law (by courtesy) at the School of Law and was selected as the first female editor of Communication Law and Policy. Before joining the UT-Austin faculty, she taught at Northwestern University's campus in Doha, Qatar. Prior to that, she earned tenure at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the intersection of law and new technology as it relates to freedom of expression. Specifically, she focuses on international and comparative media law and ethics issues, including media freedom, access to information and government transparency, freedom of speech, and social media and emerging technologies.
Sanders has authored more than two dozen scholarly articles in numerous law reviews and mass communication journals, including the Georgia Law Review, Tulane Law Review, the Journal of International Media & Entertainment Law, Federal Communication Law Journal, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Civic Information. Her research has been funded by multiple grants, most recently from the National Science Foundation. She is a co-author of the widely recognized law school casebook First Amendment and the Fourth Estate: The Law of Mass Media, published by Foundation Press (Thomson Reuters).
In addition to her research, Sanders serves on the Board of Directors for the Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes, supports and defends the First Amendment rights of student journalists and their advisers. An expert witness and consultant to Fortune 500 companies on media law and ethics issues, Sanders has counseled international governments and law firms regarding regulatory proceedings, policy development, and pending litigation. She has been quoted by the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Reason Magazine, Mother Jones, Wired, the Dallas Morning News, and numerous other media outlets. Sanders has published opinion columns in major newspapers, including in USA Today, the Houston Chronicle and the Austin American-Statesman.
As a teacher, Sanders has developed and taught courses on comparative media law, media ethics, surveillance technologies and media leadership. Her pedagogy work has been funded by grants aimed to increase the use of technology in the classroom and to develop blended-learning curricula. Sanders enjoys traveling abroad with students on both academic and co-curricular trips and has taken students to the United States, United Kingdom, and Vietnam.
Sanders worked as a copy editor and page designer for the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun, then a New York Times Co. newspaper. She earned a Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of Florida. She obtained her MA in professional journalism and her Juris Doctorate at the University of Iowa, where she focused her studies on media law and policy.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Practice
- Journalist
Andrew Butters is a journalist who has written extensively about the Middle East. A native New Yorker, he moved to Lebanon as a freelance correspondent in the summer of 2003. For the next eight years, from his home base in Beirut, he covered the region from Iran to Libya, from the war in Iraq to the Arab Spring, eventually becoming Middle East bureau chief for TIME Magazine.
Though Andrew was born and bred in Manhattan, his mother's family has lived in Delaware since the 17thcentury and is still involvedin state politics. His father's family is from Massachusetts, where his grandfather -a World War I veteran -was a bartender. Andrew has degrees in history from Brown and Cambridge universities and in journalism from Columbia.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Dr. Celeste González de Bustamante is Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Moody College of Communication and holds the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair in the School of Journalism and Media. She is an unwavering advocate for students, staff, and faculty and endeavors to create positive social change through academia, media, and communication. An innovative educator who has been recognized for community-engaged learning, she has developed and implemented award-winning experiential classes. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary issues related to media in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Mexico, and other parts of Latin America. She also is advancing research about Filipina/o/x American communities and media in the twentieth century. Her latest book is Surviving Mexico: Resistance and Resilience Among Journalists in the Twenty-first Century (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2021) (with Dr. Jeannine E. Relly) has received three national awards, the James W. Tankard Book Award, the Knudson Latin America Prize, and the Frank Luther Mott - KTA Journalism & Mass Communication Research Award.
Dr. González de Bustamante is an active member and leader in numerous academic organizations including the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, in which she serves as the chair of the Elected Standing Committee on Research. She co-heads the Border Journalism Network/La red de periodistas de la frontera, and is a member of the International Communication Association, the Latin American Studies Association, and the Association for Borderlands Studies. Prior to joining Moody College, Dr. González de Bustamante co-founded and served as director of The University of Arizona Center for Border and Global Journalism and held a dual courtesy appointment with the UA Center for Latin American Studies and was an affiliated faculty member of the Department of History, Mexican American Studies Department and of the Graduate Programs in Human Rights Practice. She received her Ph.D. in History from The University of Arizona. Before going into academia, she worked for 15 years as a journalist in commercial and public television in the San Francisco Bay Area and at network affiliates in the Southwest.
Job Titles:
- Senior Academic Program Coordinator
Chelsea Stockton provides academic services, advising and support to all prospective and currently enrolled graduate students in the School of Journalism and Media. She was previously Graduate Studies Coordinator with the Department of Communication Studies at Texas State University. She has a background in print production and was a copy editor in Harlingen after earning bachelor's degrees in Journalism and English from Texas State. She later returned to her alma mater and obtained a Master of Arts in Literature.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Practice
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Business Journalist
Dan Zehr is an award-winning business journalist whose breadth of reporting spans most major industries and geographies. He spent the better part of the past two decades writing books and reporting for daily newspapers, most recently covering the economy and finance for the Austin American-Statesman, to which he still contributes. Zehr has co-authored or edited seven books, including works on artificial intelligence, digital marketing, social media strategies, and consumer market opportunities in developing economies. His latest book-editing projects include Solomon's Code: Humanity in a World of Thinking Machines (Pegasus Books, November 2018).
Since graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in May 2000, Zehr has reported on Walmart, Dell and a range of other public companies and industries, as well as state government, utilities regulation, retail and technology. In addition to two tours at the American-Statesman, his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Seattle Times and other publications. He has won multiple awards, including a national finalist recognition from the Society of Business Editors and Writers' Best in Business competition. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Erin, and their two children.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Instruction
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Vice - Chair of the Media Ethics Division of the Association for Education
Dr. Anita Varma is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media at UT Austin, where she focuses on media ethics. She also leads the Solidarity Journalism Initiative at the Center for Media Engagement, where she is a senior faculty research associate. As a publicly engaged scholar, Varma's work focuses on the role of solidarity in journalism.
Varma is the vice-chair of the Media Ethics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), and serves on the board of the Society of Professional Journalists (Northern California Chapter). Before joining the School of Journalism & Media, she was the assistant director of Journalism & Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics (Santa Clara University), and a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley's School of Journalism.
Varma received her PhD in Communication from Stanford University. Her dissertation, Solidarity in Action: A Case Study of Journalistic Humanizing Techniques in the San Francisco Homeless Project, received the inaugural Penn State Davis Ethics Award. Her scholarly work has been published in Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Journalism, Routledge Companion to Media and Poverty, and A Handbook of Global Media Ethics (SpringerLink). She believes journalism can help change the world for the better, and dedicates herself to helping journalists do their best work.
Gina M. Masullo is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Associate Director of the Center for Media Engagement in the Moody College of Communication at UT Austin.
Dr. Masullo's research focuses on how the digital space both connects and divides people and how that influences society, individuals, and journalism. She is the author of Online Incivility and Public Debate: Nasty Talk and The New Town Hall: Why We Engage Personally with Politicians and co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age.
Before entering academia Dr. Masullo spent 20 years as a newspaper and online reporter and editor, with most of her professional experience at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, NY. During her tenure as a journalist, she covered crime, courts, prisons, and state and local government, as well as served as an assistant city editor, bureau chief, and copy editor. Near the end of her journalistic career, she wrote and blogged about parenting and young children for the newspaper. She holds a B.A. in communication from Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in mass communication from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Before coming to UT, she spent two years as an Assistant Professor at The University of Southern Mississippi's School of Mass Communication and Journalism.
In her work at the grant-funded Center for Media Engagement, she conducts theoretically drive and empirically rigorous solutions to news organizations' challenges. Currently, she and her CME colleagues are working on a connective democracy initiative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The initiative seeks to develop practical solutions to the problem of societal division.
Jim Spencer is a media entrepreneur who has helped lead start-up and established Internet, mobile as well as evolving media and technology companies. Jim founded Newsy, an early online, mobile and OTT video news service (conjointly now a cable and satellite news network) that was acquired by the E.W. Scripps Company. Previously, Jim was VP of Answers at Ask Jeeves where he was responsible for search queries and helped guide the company through a successful IPO. Prior to Ask Jeeves, Jim was the GM of News and Information Programming at AOL (News, Sports, Health, Research and International) - advancing the content, business and partnership operations for channels and communities. Jim served as executive director of strategic partnerships for NBC based at NBC's NYC headquarters and Microsoft's Redmond campus. Previously, Jim was GM of new media at Multimedia, Inc. leading up to its acquisition by Gannett. Jim has a bachelor's degree in film from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and a master's degree from the Missouri School of Journalism. He actively serves as a mentor, investor and board member to start-up media and technology companies.
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus at the University of Houston Law Center
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor of Practice
John Schwartz is a professor of practice in journalism and at the UT Austin School of Journalism Media and associate director of U.T.'s new Global Sustainability Leadership Institute.
From 1985 until 1992, he worked at Newsweek Magazine, ultimately becoming a senior editor in the business section. He then moved to The Washington Post as a science reporter, writing on a range of topics including federal efforts to regulate the tobacco industry, the Unabomber case, and the school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. In 2000, The New York Times hired him, initially to cover technology. Over the next 21 years, his beats included the U.S. space program, including the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew, Hurricane Katrina and the efforts to rebuild hurricane protection around the city, legal affairs and, most recently, climate change. At the NYT and WP, he wrote stories for nearly every section of the newspaper. He retired from The Times on July 31, 2021.
He has written several books, including "Oddly Normal: One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality," and "This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order."
He was born in Galveston, Texas, the third son of A.R. "Babe" Schwartz and Marilyn Ruth Cohn Schwartz. His parents were civic leaders, and his father served in the Texas Senate from 1961 until 1980, where he was a champion of civil rights and of environmental protection.
John attended Ball High School and the University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated in 1979 with honors from the Plan II liberal arts program. He went on to UT Law School. While attending the law school, he got involved with campus journalism, and he became editor of the student magazine, UTmost, and then The Daily Texan. He did not practice law, though his parents thought it would have been a good idea.
He married his college sweetheart, Jeanne Mixon of Houston. She is the daughter of John Mixon, professor emeritus at the University of Houston Law Center, and Doris Gibson. John and Jeanne met a week before UT classes began in 1975, in front of Jester Center. They now live in Pflugerville. They have three children, who live in Pflugerville, New Jersey and Australia, and two grandchildren.
Job Titles:
- Amon G. Carter Centennial Professor of Communications
- Professor
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Practice
- Television Journalist
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Practice
Kathleen McElroy is a professor in the School of Journalism and Media at The University of Texas at Austin.
She received her Ph.D. from the School of Journalism in December 2014, after nearly 30 years as a professional journalist. At The New York Times, she held various management positions, including associate managing editor, dining editor, deputy sports editor and deputy editor of the website. She previously worked for The National, an all-sports daily and Newsday on Long Island as well as the Austin American-Statesman, The Huntsville Item and the Bryan-College Station Eagle in Texas.
While earning her doctorate, she was a Harrington Graduate Fellow and received awards for teaching and research. Her research interests include racial discourse, collective memory, sports media and obituaries.
She previously was an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, where she taught news reporting and sports media.
She received a Masters of Arts from New York University, with a focus on race and media, and a Bachelor of Arts in broadcast journalism from Texas A&M.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director, Associate Professor of Practice
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director of Administration
Liesbeth Demaer provides administrative oversight to the School, including instructional budget, course scheduling, faculty affairs, human resources management, scholarship planning and overall staying in compliance with university systems.
Mallary Tenore is a lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin's School of Journalism and Media, where she teaches writing and reporting courses for journalism and public relations students. She's also the Associate Director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at UT, where she oversees the Center's staff, programmatic work, events, fundraising, and more.
Previously, Mallary was Executive Director of Images & Voices of Hope (ivoh), a media nonprofit, where she created a reporting fellowship and oversaw event management, partnerships, fundraising, and the organization's website and social media presence. Prior to ivoh, Mallary was Managing Editor of The Poynter Institute's world-renowned media news site, Poynter.org, where she edited and reported stories about the media industry. She also taught in Poynter seminars geared toward helping journalists improve their writing and reporting skills. She remains an adjunct faculty member for The Poynter Institute and has led writing trainings for journalists around the world.
In 2013, Mallary was named one of the top 50 female innovators in digital journalism. In 2012, she was featured on a list of the top 100 Twitter accounts every journalism student should follow and was named a Mirror Award finalist for outstanding media reporting. Mallary's articles and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Tampa Bay Times, and more. She's currently writing a memoir about eating disorder recovery and enjoys teaching the craft of personal essay and memoir writing.
Mallary holds bachelor's degrees in English and Spanish from Providence College, as well as a master's of fine arts in nonfiction writing from Goucher College. She lives outside of Austin with her husband and two young children.
Michael Pearson is a lifelong journalist whose work includes 24 years of reporting, writing and editing for Texas newspapers, a news bureau correspondency in Washington D.C. and two decades in broadcast and online news production and television newsroom leadership. Pearson, a 1978 journalism graduate of Texas State University, is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the Radio, Television, Digital News Association (RTDNA). He has completed professional training in newsroom leadership at the Poynter Institute and with the Carole Kneeland Project for Responsible Journalism.
After graduation from Texas State, Pearson worked at the Killeen Daily Herald, the San Angelo Standard-Times and the San Antonio Express-News before joining Hearst Newspapers at the San Antonio Light. While reporting at the Standard-Times in San Angelo, Pearson broke the "Kerrville-West Texas" half of criminal investigations into the mysterious deaths of over 30 pediatric patients at two hospitals - one in San Antonio and the other in Kerrville - involving a nurse later convicted of murder. He continued this reporting for all of Harte-Hanks' Texas newspapers. While at the Express-News in San Antonio, Pearson broke a story about a Hill Country ranching family kidnapping homeless people from the streets of San Antonio and forcing them into chained servitude that included torture and murder.
At The Light from 1985 until the newspaper's closure in 1993, Pearson was an investigative reporter on the newspaper's award-winning Special Projects Team. He reported on corruption throughout the ranks of the San Antonio Police Department and the city's inability to hold its police department and police union in check; corruption in the Bexar County courts and the District Attorney's Office involving the disappearance of driving while intoxicated cases represented by lawyers who contributed to the DA's political campaigns; and a case of bribery and conspiracy that led to a federal prison sentence for U.S. Congressman Albert Bustamante.
Following The Light's closure, Pearson was one of a handful of staff that Hearst Newspapers asked to stay on and was assigned to the Hearst Washington Bureau, where he reported primarily for the San Francisco Examiner on the economically devastating closure or realignment of military facilities across California. Not especially fond of reporting in Washington, Pearson decided to return to Texas when recruited to lead investigative reporting efforts at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. While reporting there, Pearson exposed a scheme by the then longest-serving Texas state senator involving his use of political pressure on local government leaders to contract with his insurance agency for government employee health insurance plans.
Pearson left Corpus Christi to return to San Antonio in 1995 to join the staff of KSAT-TV, the Post-Newsweek Stations ABC affiliate. Having had no training in broadcast news, Pearson asked to start work as an associate producer, where he co-produced the morning newscasts - while learning the art of broadcast writing and the symbiotic relationship between reporting, words and pictures and sound. He then quickly moved up to assignment editor and then assignment manager. Pearson was a key member of the leadership team that took KSAT from the perennial No. 2 news station in San Antonio to No. 1 for all newscasts.
In 2000, Pearson joined the staff of Time Warner's News 8 Austin, a groundbreaking 24-hour local news channel as the assistant news director, leading its hour-to-hour news coverage and production.
While in this position, Pearson led the station's nonstop coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Only two television news organizations were awarded the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Bronze Medallion for coverage of 9/11 - NBC News and its "Today Show" for networks and major markets and News 8 Austin for all other markets. The judges found that while every news organization in the country was focused on events in New York City, only News 8 Austin focused on the attacks' impact on Austin and Central Texas.
Pearson was elevated in 2010 to Director of News & Programming when News 8 Austin became YNN and, later, Time Warner Cable News. He led the creation of "Capital Tonight," the only daily newscast in the state dedicated to Texas politics and government. He also established Time Warner Cable News in San Antonio in 2014.
In addition to the Sigma Delta Chi Bronze Medallion, Pearson has received the Texas Gavel Award for reporting on corruption in the judiciary, the national Edward R. Murrow Award for best documentary for a series on child abuse in Austin and Travis County and several Associated Press Managing Editors and AP Broadcasting Awards.
Pearson is married to Kelley Shannon, also a journalist, who is executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, working to assure that journalists - and all citizens - enjoy their full rights to open government. They have a son, Sam, who is a senior at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
Job Titles:
- Member of the School of Journalism
Paul J. Thompson became a faculty member of the School of Journalism in 1919, beginning a 45-year career of journalism teaching and administration. He served as chairman of the department from 1927 to 1958.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Practice
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Artist
Raymond Thompson is an artist, educator, and journalist based in Austin, TX. He is an incoming Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at The University of Texas at Austin. He has a MFA in photography from West Virginia University. He received his masters degree from The University of Texas at Austin in journalism and graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA is American Studies. He received the 2020 Lenscratch Student Prize. He has worked as a freelance photographer for The New York Times, ACLU, Politico, NPR, The Nature Conservancy, The Intercept, NBC News, Propublica, WBEZ, Google, Merrell and the Associated Press.
Renita Coleman has 15 years of experience as a newspaper journalist and a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. "Her latest book is "Designing Experiments for the Social Sciences: How to Plan, Create and Execute Research Using Experiments," published by SAGE. She is an associated editor of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly."
Her research focuses on agenda-setting, race, visual communication and ethics. She has studied the effects of photographs on ethical reasoning, the framing and attribution of responsibility in health news, and the moral development of journalists and public relations practitioners, among other topics. She has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles in academic journals including Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Visual Communication Quarterly, Newspaper Research Journal, Journalism, and Journalism Studies. In addition to the new book, she has another book, "The Moral Media: How Journalists Reason About Ethics," published in 2005 with co-author with Lee Wilkins of the University of Missouri.
Before beginning her academic career, Coleman was a journalist at newspapers and magazines for 15 years. She was a reporter, editor, and designer at the Raleigh, N.C. News & Observer, the Sarasota FL Herald-Tribune, and the Orlando, FL Sentinel among other news organizations.
Coleman, R. (2010). "Framing the pictures in our heads: Exploring the framing and agenda-setting effects of visual images," In P. D'Angelo and J. Kuypers (eds.), Doing news framing analysis: Empirical, theoretical, and normative perspectives. Chapter 10, pp 233-261. Routledge.
Wu, H. D., & Coleman, R. (2014) The affective effect on political judgment: Comparing the influences of candidate attributes and issue congruence. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 91(3 Fall):530-543.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Practice
Job Titles:
- Director of the IC 2 Institute
- Ernest a. Sharpe Centennial Professor
- Professor
S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor and the Executive Director of the IC 2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the equity implications of computer-mediated technologies. Craig is one of the Principal Investigators for UT-Austin's Good Systems Grand Challenge, a University funded initiative that supports multi-disciplinary explorations of the technical, social, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. Craig's team explores the racial equity implications of artificial intelligence, focusing on how implicit biases, for example, in datasets, model formulation, and deployment can lead to disparate impacts, especially in high stakes contexts such as healthcare and policing. His collaborative research with Design and the School of Information examines how Black and Latinx children interact with AI-consumer devices like digital assistants. Craig was also part of multidisciplinary team of social scientists, psychologists, and computer scientists who prototyped a chatbot to support parents dealing with postpartum depression. Craig leads a team that is adopting a data-oriented approach to understanding the social determinants of health. This current research has led to the design of an AI-based solutions to mitigate the mental healthcare crisis in the U.S. His team has been selected to join Texas Health Catalyst, a program in the Dell Medical School and Office of Technology Commercialization at UT-Austin that translates early stage ideas and discoveries into products that improve health.
Craig was a Visiting MLK Professor at MIT, where he continues to collaborate with faculty in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) to study the racial equity implications of artificial intelligence. That work, for example, explores the impact of big data and systemic inequality in housing, the data dilemma in policing, and the future of artificial intelligence and racial justice.
As the Director of the IC 2 Institute, Craig is leading a new initiative related to the "well-being economy." The research considers the health and well-being of all members of society and the capacity to foster individual and community resilience in the face of unprecedented social, economic, and technological transformations . The IC 2 Institute has a long history of studying the intersections between technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. IC 2 is leveraging this deep expertise to: conduct an analysis of how COVID-19 is transforming the role of digital literacy programming in public libraries; produce an economic impact analysis of the Dell Medical School; collaborate with the city of Austin to develop a Prosperity Index; study the transformation of telehealth; and partner with community institutions like libraries and affordable housing developments to explore their capacity to deliver data-informed modalities of healthcare to, respectively, their patrons and residents.
Craig is an internationally recognized expert in media and technology systems and the author of six books and numerous articles and book chapters. His research explores, among other things, how technological innovation built the hip hop economy (Hip Hop Matters), the social and behavioral implications of young people's engagement with computer-mediated technologies (The Young and the Digital), the shifting contours of the digital divide (The Digital Edge), and the creative ways young people adopt technology to navigate a precarious society and economy (Don't Knock the Hustle). This work illuminates the nuance ways in which structural inequalities influence the design, deployment, and adoption of computer-mediated systems leading to both systemic challenges and opportunities to enhance the human experience.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Co - Editor
- Founding Director of the Digital Intelligence Lab
- Research Associate at the Project for Democracy
Samuel C. Woolley is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and an assistant professor, by courtesy, in the School of Information--both at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the project director for propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement (CME) at UT.
Woolley is currently a research associate at the Project for Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University. He has held past research affiliations at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at the University of California at Berkeley.
Woolley's research is focused on how emergent technologies are used in and around global political communication. His work on computational propaganda-the use of social media in attempts to manipulate public opinion-has revealed the ways in which a wide variety of political groups in the United States and abroad have leveraged tools such as bots and trending algorithms and tactics of disinformation and trolling in efforts to control information flows online. His research on digital politics, automation/AI, social media, and political polarization is currently supported by grants from by Omidyar Network (ON), the Miami Foundation, and the Knight Foundation. His past research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the New Venture Fund for Communications, and others.
His latest book, The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth, was released in January 2020 by PublicAffairs (US) and Octopus/Endeavour (UK). It explores the ways in which emergent technologies--from deep fakes to virtual reality--are already being leveraged to manipulate public opinion, and how they are likely to be used in the future. He proposes strategic responses to these threats with the ultimate goal of empowering activists and pushing technology builders to design for democracy and human rights.
He is currently working on two other books. Manufacturing Consensus (Yale University Press) explores the ways in which social media, and automated tools such as bots, have become global mechanisms for creating illusions of political support or popularity. He discusses the power of these tools for amplification and suppression of particular modes of digital communication, building on Herman and Chomsky's (1988) integral work on propaganda. His other book, co-authored with Nicholas Monaco, is titled Bots (Polity) and is a primer on the ways these automated tools have become integral to the flow of all manner of information online.
Woolley is the co-editor, with Philip N. Howard (Oxford) of Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media, released in 2018 by the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series at Oxford University Press. This volume of country specific case studies explores the rise of social media--and tools like algorithms and automation--as mechanisms for political manipulation around the world. He has published several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and white papers on emergent technology, the Internet and public life in publications such as the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, the International Journal of Communication, A Networked Self: Platforms, Stories, Connections, The Political Economy of Robots: Prospects for Prosperity and Peace in an Automated 21 st Century, The Handbook of Media, Conflict and Security, and Can Public Diplomacy Survive the Internet? Bots, Echo Chambers and Disinformation.
Woolley is the founding director of the Digital Intelligence Lab, a research and policy oriented project at the Institute for the Future-a 50-year-old think-tank located in Palo Alto, CA. Before this he served as the director of research at the National Science Foundation and European Research Council supported Computational Propaganda Project at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is a former resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Digital Innovation Democracy Initiative and a former Belfer Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center for Science and technology. He is a former research fellow at Jigsaw, Google's think-tank and technology incubator, at the Center Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington's Schools of Law and Information, and at the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University.
His public work on computational propaganda and social media bots has appeared in venues including Wired, the Guardian,TechCrunch, Motherboard, Slate, and The Atlantic. For his research, Woolley has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian and on PBS' Frontline, BBC's News at Ten, and ABC's Today. His work on computational propaganda and bots has been presented to members of the U.S. Congress, the U.K. Parliament, NATO, and others. His Ph.D. is in Communication from the University of Washington. His website is samwoolley.org and he tweets from @samuelwoolley.
Job Titles:
- Philip G. Warner Regents Professor
- Professor
Dr. Strover is the Philip G. Warner Regents Professor in Communication and former Chair of the Radio-TV-Film Department at the University of Texas, where she teaches communications and telecommunications courses and co-directs the Technology and Information Policy Institute. Some of her current research projects examine local and statewide networks and broadband services; the digital divide; rural broadband deployment; telecommunications infrastructure deployment and economic development in rural regions; and Artificial Intelligence issues including social media-based disinformation as well as publicly-deployed technologies. Her most recent publications examine disinformation strategies associated with Russian Facebook ads; local broadband deployment strategies around the world; and the role of broadband in rural regions. Her current undergraduate and graduate teaching addresses communication law and policy, the relationship between technology and culture, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. She has had visiting appointments at several universities around the world including the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Westminster University, Stockholm University, the New University of Lisbon, Aarhus University, among others. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service, the U.S. Federal Communication Commission, the government of Portugal, the Center for Rural Strategies, the European Union, The Appalachian Regional Commission, several State of Texas Commissions and departments, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, Facebook, Google and others.
Stephen D. Reese has been on The University of Texas at Austin faculty since 1982, where he is now the Jesse H. Jones Professor of Journalism. His teaching has ranged from undergraduate introductory courses to research-oriented graduate seminars, including freshman campus-wide Signature Courses: "Understanding 9/11" and "News Literacy: A Citizen's Guide." He has been Director of the School of Journalism and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Moody College of Communication.
His research focuses on questions of press performance, including the sociology of news, media framing of public issues, and the globalization of journalism. Along with some 100 articles, books and book chapters, Reese is co-author with Pamela Shoemaker of Mediating the Message in the 21 st Century: A Media Sociology Perspective (Routledge, 2014), a follow-up volume to its predecessor, named by Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ)as one of the "significant journalism and communication books" of the 20th century. His edited volume, Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and our Understanding of the Social World (Erlbaum, 2001), has been widely cited, and his most recent edited volume (with Wenhong Chen) is Networked China: Global Dynamics of Digital Media and Civic Engagement (Routledge, 2015). His most recent book is The Crisis of the Institutional Press (Polity, 2021). Most recently he has explored the role of open-source intelligence in the investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
He has served as book review and associate editor for JMCQ, and on its editorial board and 14 others. He was head of the Political Communication division of the International Communication Association (where he is a Fellow) and held major leadership positions with the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which awarded him the Krieghbaum Under-40 Award for outstanding achievement in research, teaching and public service and, more recently, the Paul Deutschmann Award for excellence in research.
He has been on the faculty of the Salzburg Academy for Media and Global Change (offering a summer course: Global Media Literacy) and lectured at universities around the world, including as Kurt Baschwitz Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam. His professional media work was in public and commercial radio, in Knoxville, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Madison, Wisconsin. He received his B.A. at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, from which he received the Harold L. Nelson Award in 2015 for distinguished contribution to research and education in journalism and mass communication.
William H. Mayes was named as organizer and director of the School, and served from 1914 to 1927.