Faculty

Pablo Boczkowski

Pablo J. Boczkowski holds a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University (2001). Before joining Northwestern in 2005, he was Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His research program examines the transition from print to digital media, with a focus on the organizational and occupational dynamics of contemporary journalism. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (MIT Press, 2004), News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and over twenty papers and fifty conference presentations. He is currently working on three book projects. The first, joint with Eugenia Mitchelstein, analyzes the divergent online news preferences of journalists and consumers in North America, Latin America and Western Europe, and reflects on the implications of this divergence for the future of media and democracy. The second is an ethnographic and historical study of the demise of print newspapers in the United States, France and Argentina as a window into larger dynamics of institutional crisis. The third, in collaboration with Tarleton Gillespie and Kirsten Foot, is an edited volume on the linkages between the fields of communication and science and technology studies. For more information, see his personal site.

Noshir Contractor

Professor Noshir Contractor is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. Specifically, his research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, science and engineering communities, disaster response teams, public health networks, digital media and learning networks, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life.

James Ettema

James S. Ettema is Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University where his teaching and research focus on the social organization and cultural impact of mass media and new communication technologies. He worked as a film maker and photographer before pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Michigan. He is a co-founder of Northwestern University's Media, Technology and Society graduate program. He served for six years as chair of Communication Studies and for ten years as the faculty coordinator of professional graduate programs in the department.

Among his books is Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue written with Theodore L. Glasser of Stanford University. The book won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Award from the National Journalism and Mass Communication Honor Society, the Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism from Penn State University, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for research on journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Recent articles include "A Community Confronts the Digital Divide: A Case Study of Social Capital Formation through Communication Activism" written with Andrew P. Herman;"Journalism as Reason-Giving: Deliberative Democracy, Institutional Accountability and the News Media's Mission; and "Crafting Cultural Resonance: Imaginative Power in Everyday Journalism." His current research includes media coverage of warfare and the contribution of new media to public affairs discourse.

Darren Gergle

Darren Gergle's teaching and research interests are broadly defined by the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). In particular, he is interested in furthering our theoretical understanding of the impact technological mediation has on communication, and applying this to the design, development, and evaluation of novel collaboration technologies.

Wendy Griswold

Wendy Griswold, Professor of Sociology and affiliated with Comparative Literary Studies, English, and Communications, holds a Ph.D. from Harvard (1980) and has previously taught there and at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include: cultural sociology; sociological approaches to literature, art and religion; regionalism, urban representations, and the culture of place; the Federal Writers' Project; and comparative studies of reading practices. Recent books include Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (Princeton UP, 2000), Cultures and Societies in a Changing World 3rd ed. (Pine Forge 2008), and Regionalism and the Reading Class (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Professor Griswold directs the Culture and Society Workshop at the Alice Berline Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Eszter Hargittai

Eszter Hargittai's research focuses on the social and policy implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with a particular interest in how ICTs may be alleviating or contributing to social inequality. Her research projects have looked at differences in people's Web-use skills, the evolution of search engines and the organization and presentation of online content, political uses of information technologies, how people search for complex health questions online, the role of digital media in the job search process, and how IT are influencing the types of cultural products people consume, produce and disseminate. In her research group, the Web Use Project, she works with graduate and undergraduate students to explore the social, cultural, political and economic implications of digital media. She is editor of "Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have" (The University of Michigan Press 2009), which presents a behind-the-scenes look at the realities of doing empirical social science research. She writes a career advice column called Ph.Do at Inside Higher Ed. In addition to her academic articles, her work is regularly featured in the media. Her current research has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Nokia Research, Google and the Hiatt Fund at Northwestern University. For more information, including her CV, see eszter.com. For copies of her publications, see webuse.org/pubs.

Paul Leonardi

Paul Leonardi (Ph.D. Stanford University) is an assistant professor and the Allen K. and Johnnie Cordell Breed Junior Chair of Design in the departments of Communication Studies, Industrial engineering & Management Sciences, and (by courtesy) Management and Organizations at Northwestern University.

Leonardi’s research and teaching focus on how organizations can employ advanced information technologies to more effectively create and share knowledge. This focus draws attention to the processes through which technological artifacts and informal communication networks co-evolve within organizational contexts. He is particularly interested in how computationally sophisticated technologies enable new ways to access, store, and share information; how new sources of information that such technologies provide change peoples' work practices and communication partners; and how shifts in employees' work and communication alter the nature of an organization's expertise.

His research on these topics has been funded by the National Science Foundation and has received awards from the Academy of Management, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the American Sociological Association, the Association for Information Systems, the International Communication Association, and the National Communication Association.

For more information, see his personal site.

Jennifer Light

Jennifer S. Light is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, History, and Sociology and a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Dr. Light's research investigates the work of technical experts in the political process, with special interest in these figures' influences on US urban history. She is the author of From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (2003) and The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions (2009), both published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Dr. Light serves as Associate Editor for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences and she is on the editorial board of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. With generous assistance from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Robert and Kay Hiatt Fund, Light is currently working on two research projects: a history of pre-electronic urban information systems (maps) that uses GIS as an analytic tool, and a history of civic games in the US.

Barbara O'Keefe

Barbara J. O'Keefe is Professor of Communication Studies, Annenberg University Professor, and Dean of the School of Communication at Northwestern University. She earned her A.B., A. M., and Ph.D. in Speech Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She held faculty positions at Wayne State University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Northwestern.

Dr. O'Keefe's work is highly interdisciplinary. Prior to coming to Northwestern, she served as Director of the University of Michigan Media Union, a center for interdisciplinary study and application of emerging digital media. She has edited two books and authored over 60 technical publications, including contributed chapters in books, articles, or reviews in archive journals, and chapters in refereed conference proceedings. Much of this work is focused on developing and applying systems for content analysis of communication in studies of life-span communication development. She has also had a long-term interest in the application of interactive computing to support cooperative work and learning. She was a co-PI on Project CITY, a project funded by the NSF for 3 years to study human-centered design of collaboration technology to support sustainable management of civil infrastructure in a public works department. She has been involved in several additional studies of the use of interactive computing to support scientific and engineering teams. She has also studied and developed computer-based tools to support instruction and learning in communication and engineering education. Her work at the University of Michigan Media Union involved (1) development of an enterprise-wide learning technology infrastructure to allow faculty to use the web more effectively in their teaching; (2) management of the advanced technology facilities of the Media Union, including high-performance computing and networking, visualization and virtual reality technologies, and digital media production and post-production facilities; and (3) nurturing cross-disciplinary teams involved in applications of leading-edge technologies across the disciplines. She is currently part of a multi-institutional team, funded by the National Science Foundation, that is working to organize the available knowledge about interactive media for children and collaborating with industry partners to improve children's access to high-quality media.

She has served as a reviewer for Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Language and Social Psychology, Research on Language and Social Interaction, International Journal of Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Communication Theory, and other leading journals.

Daniel O'Keefe

Daniel O’Keefe is the Owen L. Coon Professor in the Department of Communication Studies. His research focuses on organizing and synthesizing the substantial body of work derived from persuasion studies—the effects of messages on persuasion and the distinctive problems associated with the development of dependable generalizations about persuasive message effects. His work seeks to derive and integrate findings from the large number of extant persuasion effects studies, especially through quantitative methods for research synthesis (meta-analysis).

For more information, see his personal site.

Janice Radway

Janice Radway is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, and A Feeling for Books: The Book- of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire. She has just completed volume 4 of a five-volume, collaborative history of the book in the United States (with Carl Kaestle). Her current research interests are in the history of literacy and reading in the United States, particularly as they bear on the lives of women. Radway is a past president of the American Studies Association.

James Schwoch

James Schwoch is the Senior Associate Dean for the School of Communication at Northwestern University in Qatar, and Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He has published five books to date, most recently Global TV: New Media and the Cold War, 1946-69 (Illinois, 2009) and also published many articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and essays. Schwoch’s next book, currently in production with Rutgers University Press, is a co-edited volume with Lisa Parks (UC-Santa Barbara) titled Down To Earth: Satellite Industries, Technologies and Cultures.His research and teaching areas include global media, media history, diplomacy and international relations, and global security. Schwoch has held fellowships and external research funding from, among others, the Fulbright Commission (Finland 2005, Germany 1997); the Ford Foundation (1996-2000); the National Science Foundation (1998-2002); and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1985, 1986) and visiting professorial appointments in Finland at the Universities of Tampere (1994), Jyvaskyla (1996), and Helsinki (1994, 2005.) During 1997-98 he was in residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, where he was the Leonard Marks Fellow in Global Communications Policy. He has also advised, or served as a consultant, to many government agencies, private foundations, and similar entities in the USA and abroad, including the International Telecommunications Union, the MacArthur Foundation, the Institute of Defense Analyses, the University of Ljubljana, the Royal Society of New Zealand, the University de Sorbonne, the Newberry Library, the National Defense University, Orange (France Telecom), the History Channel, Maastricht University, and the Qatar Foundation. Working on both the Doha and Evanston campuses of Northwestern University—but more often than not in Doha—Schwoch continues to participate on PhD dissertation committees and advise graduate students as relevant to his areas of research expertise.

Ellen Wartella

Ellen Wartella researches the effects of media on children and adolescents, and the impact of food marketing in the childhood obesity crisis.

James Webster

James G. Webster is a Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His primary research interest is media use. He’s written extensively about television audience behavior, program choice and, more recently, patterns of media consumption across digital platforms.  Secondary areas of interest are audience measurement, media industries, and the social impact of new media. He is the author of Ratings Analysis: The Theory and Practice of Audience Research, which is the standard text on electronic media measurement.

From 1990 to 2005, Prof. Webster served as Associate Dean in Northwestern’s School of Communication where he oversaw facilities planning, graduate education and helped create the doctoral program in Media, Technology and Society. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and the Journal of Communication.  He has served as a consultant to Nielsen, Arbitron, Initiative Media, and the Rudd Center at Yale University. For more information, see his personal site.

D. Charles Whitney

Whitney is professor of communication studies and associate dean of the school for academic affairs. His research focuses on the sociology and social history of mass communicators. He joined the faculty in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside, where he was chair of the Department of Creative Writing and a professor of Media and Cultural Studies.