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Angela Ards

Angela Ards is Associate Professor of English at Boston College. She teaches African American and contemporary American literature, with special interests in cultural studies, literary journalism, and narratives of place. She is the author of Words of Witness: Black Women鈥檚 Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era, and her current book project uses oral histories to chronicle the lives of black Americans who bypassed the Great Migration to remain in the South. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Mustafa Akyol

Mustafa Akyol is a听 in Washington DC, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity.听In 2023, he joined The Islamic Civilization and Societies program at Boston College as a Senior Lecturer. He teaches the course, 鈥淚slam and Modernity: The Turkish Experience.鈥澨�Akyol is the author of (2021), (2021), (2017), and (2011). His books have received praise in publications such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Book Review, Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, The Economist, or National Catholic Reporter, and have been translated into languages including Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Bosnian, Dari, Urdu, Malaysian and Indonesian. Islam without Extremes was banned in Malaysia in 2017 after Akyol鈥檚 short arrest by the country鈥檚 鈥渞eligion police鈥� because Akyol delivered a public lecture advocating religious freedom.

Riada Asimovic Akyol

Riada Asimovic Akyol is a Journalist, Strategic Initiatives Editor at听New
Lines听magazine, where she helps shape strategic expansion,听oversees the development and realization of special projects,听and launch of new products in digital format and multimedia.听Her writing on politics from the wider Balkans, religion, culture听and gender has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic,听Foreign Policy, Al-Jazeera, Al-Monitor, The Nation. She has听made frequent appearances on international television shows听and conferences featuring conversations on Bosnian genocide听and related topics.听She is also an avid podcaster and founder of 鈥淒ignified听Resilience.鈥� For New Lines, she channeled her passion for听facilitating meaningful conversations to 鈥淕ood Talk鈥� Instagram听Live Series, and currently hosts a weekly 鈥淲ider Angle鈥� audio听and video interview podcast.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr

Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a senior opinion writer and columnist at The Boston Globe. She is also an MSN香蕉秀 contributor, a guest host for the NPR/WBUR-produced news program On Point, and co-host of the weekly Politicon legal news podcast #SistersInLaw.听Previously, Kim was the first Washington, DC-based news correspondent for WBUR. She has also served as the Boston Herald鈥檚 Washington bureau chief, guest host of C-SPAN鈥檚 morning call-in show Washington Journal, and a Supreme Court reporter for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and its sister publications.听She has appeared as a political commentator on a host of national and international television and radio networks, including CNN, Fox News, N香蕉秀 News, PBS, NPR, Sky News (UK), and C香蕉秀 News (Canada).听Before launching her journalism career, she was a trial and appellate litigation attorney in Boston.听Kimberly is a native of Michigan, and a graduate of Wayne State University, Boston University School of Law and Boston University College of Communication, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Erik Bleich

Erik Bleich is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College in Vermont. He writes about European and North American responses to religious, racial, and ethnic diversity through the media, policymaking, public attitudes, social movements, and legal decisions. In 2012 he launched the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project, which combines approaches from the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields to understand how the media represent marginalized groups. He is the author of Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective (with A. Maurits van der Veen) and the editor of Migrants, Minorities and the Media: Information, Representations and Participation in the Public Sphere (with Irene Bloemraad and Els de Graauw). His public-facing work has appeared in outlets such as The Atlantic, Asahi Shimbun, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post.

Joshua P. Darr

Joshua P. Darr (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an associate professor of political communication in the Manship School of Mass Communication and Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. He also serves as Associate Dean of Research & Strategic Initiatives in the Manship School. His research interests are in American political behavior and the news media, with a focus on local media, political identity, and civic engagement. From 2022-2024, he will serve as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, conducting research on the connection between local media and political polarization. He has written about politics, media, and his research for popular outlets such as FiveThirtyEight, The Boston Globe, and Scientific American. His first book,听Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, is co-authored with Matthew Hitt and Johanna Dunaway and was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.

Tiziana Dearing

is the host of Radio Boston on WBUR. She has been a commentator and contributor to WBUR for more than a decade, and has contributed to a number of other regional and national news outlets. Prior to joining the Radio Boston team, Tiziana was a professor at Boston College in the School of Social Work, where she taught social innovation and leadership. A longtime anti-poverty advocate, Tiziana also ran Boston Rising, a startup antipoverty fund to end generational poverty in Boston, and was the first woman president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Boston. She has won a number of awards in the city, including a Pinnacle Award from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and Boston Business Journal鈥檚 40 Under 40.

Joan Donovan, PhD

Dr. Donovan is a leading public scholar and disinformation researcher, specializing in media manipulation, political movements, critical internet studies, and online extremism. She is the Research Director of the Harvard Kennedy School鈥檚 Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the Director of the Technology and Social Change project (TaSC). Through TaSC, Dr. Donovan explores how media manipulation is a means to control public conversation, derail democracy, and disrupt society. TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns.听Dr. Donovan is co-author of the book Meme Wars, The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. Her research can be found in academic peer-reviewed journals such as Social Media + Society, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Information, Communication & Society, and Social Studies of Science. She is a columnist at MIT Technology Review, a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and PBS, and is quoted often on radio and in print.

Carol Ferrara听

Carol Ferrara is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Marketing Communication department at Emerson College with diverse academic and professional expertise in anthropology, diversity, pluralism, religion, education, and business. Her research has focused on religion in secular societies, and most prominently, the ways that Muslims and Catholics navigate and negotiate faith, plurality, ethics, and national identity in secular France. She has published multiple and book chapters about and private in France, and a collaborative article on . Her debut book, Muslim and Catholic experiences with French national belonging: rethinking boundaries, inequalities, and faith in the Republic (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Academic), is a comparative ethnography of divergent Muslim and Catholic experiences of national (non)belonging and the consequences of Muslim exclusion for civic engagement in secular France. Carol holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from Boston University, and a dual MA in Middle East & Islamic Studies and International Affairs from the American University in Paris. She is a co-Chair of the American Academy of Religion鈥檚 鈥淩eligion in Europe鈥� Program Unit.

Caleb Gayle

Caleb Gayle is an award-winning journalist who writes about race and identity and a professor at Northeastern University, a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change, and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of the book听We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power (Riverhead Books, 2022), which offers a narrative account of how many Black Native Americans were divided and marginalized by white supremacy in America.听At Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, Gayle is working on his latest project, 鈥淧USHAHEAD: The Story of Edward McCabe and His Dreams to Colonize,鈥� about the true-life story of a Black politician who tried to make Oklahoma into an all-Black state.听His writing has been featured in鈥痶he Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, Guernica, the鈥疕arvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the鈥疦ew Republic,鈥痶he鈥疦ew York Times, the鈥疦ew York Times Magazine, Pacific Standard, 补苍诲鈥痶丑别鈥疶hreepenny Review, among others, and anthologized as a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2019 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).

Zac Gershberg

Zac Gershberg is an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Idaho State University. He co-authored The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion (2022) with Sean Illing of Vox for the University of Chicago Press. Gershberg鈥檚 research interests explore media ecology and journalism history at the intersections of politics, entertainment, and technology. Other works of his can be found in collected volumes such as Global Journalism: Understanding World Media Systems (2021) and The Rhetoric of Fascism (2022). At ISU, Gershberg teaches a range of courses including Media Literacy, Feature Writing, Political Communication, and Mass Media History, Law, and Ethics. He is currently at work on a new book project examining the press clause and journalistic freedom.

Susan B. Glasser

Susan B. Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Washington.

Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications, including Politico, where she founded the award-winning Politico Magazine, and Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure as editor in chief. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of Outlook and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post鈥檚 Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She edited Roll Call, a Capitol Hill newspaper, early in her career.

Her books include 鈥淜remlin Rising,鈥� 鈥淭he Man Who Ran Washington,鈥� and, most recently, 鈥淭he Divider,鈥� a best-selling history of Donald Trump in the White House, which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker.

Nicholas Hayes-Mota

Nicholas Hayes-Mota is a PhD Candidate in Theological Ethics at Boston College, and Graduate Assistant to the Director at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. His dissertation examines the possibility of a 鈥減olitics of the common good鈥� in contemporary liberal democracies, and draws on community organizing and Catholic Social Teaching to propose a way forward. His research has been published in Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Ecumenical Trends, Syndicate, and the T&T Clark Handbook of Public Theology, and he has written for a variety of popular outlets. Nicholas鈥檚 scholarship is informed by his thirteen years as a teacher and practitioner of faith-based community organizing. He presently serves as a trainer with the Leading Change Network (LCN), and a facilitator with the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO).

Heather Hendershot

Heather Hendershot is professor of film and media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of:听When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America;听Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line;听What鈥檚 Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public听Interest;听Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelicals, and听Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip.听Her essays have appeared in听the听Nation,听Politico,听The Conversation,听Salon,听and the听Washington Post.

Daniel Kreiss

Daniel Kreiss is the Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor in the听Hussman School of Journalism and Media听at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher of the听UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life.听Most recently, Kreiss co-authored听Power in Ideas: A Case-Based Argument for Taking Ideas Seriously in Political Communication Research听(2021, Cambridge University Press), and has published three books with Oxford University Press听that analyze politics and campaigning in the era of platforms. Kreiss co-edits the听Oxford University Press book series听Journalism and Political Communication Unbound听and is an associate editor of听Political Communication.听Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the听Information Society Project at Yale Law School听and received a听Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University.

Jonathan Laurence

Jonathan Laurence is Director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy and Professor of Political Science at Boston College. His principal areas of teaching and research are comparative politics and religion and politics in Western Europe, Turkey and North Africa. Prof. Laurence's latest book is Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism and the Modern State (Princeton University Press, 2021). Previously, The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims, was published by Princeton University Press in 2012, and received awards for Best Book in religion and politics and migration and citizenship from the American Political Science Association. His first book, Integrating Islam: Religious and Political Challenges in Contemporary France, co-authored with Justin Va茂sse, was published by Brookings Institution Press (2006) and Odile Jacob (2007). 听Prof. Laurence assumed the Directorship of the Clough Center in spring 2022.

Kathryn Jean Lopez

Kathryn Jean Lopez听is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute where she directs the Center for Religion, Culture, and Civil Society. She is also editor-at-large of National Review magazine where she has been on the editorial staff, including as editor of National Review Online, for over a quarter century. She is published widely in Catholic and secular publications and is also a nationally syndicated columnist with Andrews McMeel Universal. Lopez is author of A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living. She speaks frequently on faith in public life, virtue, and prayer.听

Jan-Werner Mueller

Jan-Werner Mueller听is Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He works mainly in democratic theory and the history of modern political thought; he also has research interests in the relationship between architecture and politics, as well as the normative implications of the current structural transformations of the public sphere. Publications include听Constitutional Patriotism听(2007),听Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe听(2011) and听What is Populism?听(2016), which has been translated into more than 20 languages. 2019 saw the publication of听Furcht und Freiheit: F眉r einen anderen Liberalismus, which won the Bavarian Book Prize; in 2021,听Democracy Rules听appeared with FSG, Penguin, and Suhrkamp.听

Pippa Norris

Pippa Norris is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for three decades. She is the Paul McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Harvard鈥檚 Kennedy School of Government, an Affiliated Professor at Harvard鈥檚 Government Department, and founding Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. She also served from 2012-2020 as Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government & International Relations at the University of Sydney.听Major honors include, amongst others, from APSA (the Warren E. Miller Award, the Murray Edelman Lifetime Distinguished Career Award, the Samuel Eldersveld award, the Charles Merriam award), as well as fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Isaiah Berlin Lifetime Achievement Award, the Karl Deutsch award, the Johan Skytte prize in political science, and the ARC鈥檚 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship. She has published around fifty books. This includes her latest, In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify, published by OUP in 2022. Her current writing focuses on a new book on The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding.

Mark Oppenheimer

Mark Oppenheimer has been covering American religion for 25 years. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale, and has taught at Stanford, Wesleyan, Wellesley, NYU, Boston College, and Yale, where he recently retired after 15 years as the founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. From 2010 to 2016, he wrote the 鈥淏eliefs鈥� column, about religion, for听The New York Times, and he has also written for publications including听The New Yorker, The Nation, GQ, Slate,听and many more. He created and hosts听Unorthodox, the world鈥檚 most popular podcast about Jewish life and culture, with over 6 million downloads to date. More recently, he hosted an eight-part podcast called听Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews and antisemitism at Ivy League schools. He is the author of five books, including听The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia听and, most recently,听Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, four daughters, one son, and two dogs.

Victor Pickard

Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania鈥檚 Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Pickard鈥檚 research focuses on the history of media institutions, media activism, and the politics and normative foundations of media policy. His work is particularly concerned with the future of journalism and the role of media in a democratic society. Pickard has published more than 150 scholarly articles, essays, and book chapters and he often writes for popular press outlets like听The听Guardian,听The听Washington Post,听Columbia Journalism Review,听Harvard Business Review,听Jacobin,听The Atlantic,听and听The Nation.听He has authored or edited six books, including the award-winning听America鈥檚 Battle for Media Democracy听and听Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society.听

Heather Cox Richardson

Author of听Letters from an American听on Substack, Professor Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Her early work focused on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. It examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion, and the construction of the concept of an American middle class. Her history of the Republican Party,听To Make Men Free听(2014) examines the fundamental tensions in American politics from the time of the Northwest Ordinance to the present. She is currently working on an intellectual history of American politics and a graphic treatment of the Reconstruction Era.

Carlo Rotella

Carlo Rotella is Professor of English at Boston College. He听writes for the New York Times Magazine, he has been a regular columnist for the Boston Globe and radio commentator for WGBH FM, and his work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Critical Inquiry, American Quarterly, The American Scholar, Raritan, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post Magazine, Transition, Harper鈥檚, DoubleTake, Boston, Slate, The Believer, TriQuarterly, and The Best American Essays.听听He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and The American Scholar's prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer, and Cut Time was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has received U.S. Speaker and Specialist Grants from the State Department to lecture in China and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a founding editor of the 鈥淐hicago Visions and Revisions鈥� series at the University of Chicago Press.

Michael Serazio

Michael Serazio is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College. His research and teaching focuses on media production, advertising, popular culture, political communication, and new media.His latest book is The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture (NYU Press, 2019). Serazio received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania鈥檚 Annenberg School for Communication, where he won the National Communication Association鈥檚 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He also holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of San Francisco and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University.

Sam Sawyer, S.J

Sam Sawyer, S.J., is the editor in chief of America magazine. Prior to his appointment as editor in chief, he served on the editorial staff with responsibility for America Media's digital platforms. He has written frequently on issues such as polarization, how the church communicates in a secular world, and abortion.听Before working at America Media, he served as an associate pastor at Holy Trinity Church in Washington, DC, after being ordained a priest in 2014. During his theology studies, he helped to found The Jesuit Post and served as one of its first editors.听During his Jesuit formation, Fr. Sawyer studied philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and theology at Boston College; he also taught philosophy for two years at Loyola University Maryland. Before entering the Society of Jesus, he worked as a software engineer after graduating from Boston College.

Charles Sennott

Charles Sennott is a Visiting Scholar at Boston College, teaching journalism through the Institute for Liberal Arts. He is also the Founder and Editor in Chief of , a non-profit news organization based in Boston at WGBH. Sennott launched Ground Truth 10 years ago as a way to focus on the crisis in local news globally and locally. The organization now supports 300 journalists in more than 200 newsrooms in under-covered corners of the United States through (which was featured on 60 Minutes last year) and in eight other countries through the newly launched program. Previously, Sennott served as the Boston Globe鈥�s Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem from 1997 to 2001 and as Europe Bureau Chief based in London from 2001 to 2005. He has reported on the front lines of wars and insurgencies in at least 15 countries, including the 2011 revolution in Cairo and the Arab Spring.

Mark Thompson

Mark Thompson became Chairman of Ancestry.com in December 2020. He is also co-Chair of the International Fund for Public Interest Media, Deputy Chair of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a senior advisor to Blackstone Inc, an advisor to the Supervisory Board of Axel Springer SE, a trustee of the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company and a member of the advisory board of the Bodleian Library Oxford University. He is an honorary fellow of Merton College Oxford and a member of the American Philosophical Society.听Mr. Thompson stepped down as President & CEO at The New York Times Company in the summer of 2020 after an eight-year tenure in which the 170-year-old news brand was transformed into a digital powerhouse. Digital subscribers jumped to nearly 6 million, up from half a million when he joined, while digital revenues topped $450 million at the end of 2019.听Mr. Thompson's appointment at The New York Times Company followed an eight-year term as Director General of the B香蕉秀. He is widely credited with expanding the B香蕉秀鈥檚 digital reach and overseeing development of the B香蕉秀 iPlayer. He joined the B香蕉秀 from Channel 4 where he was Chief Executive from 2002 to 2004. Before Channel 4 he held a series of senior posts at the B香蕉秀 including Editor of The Nine O鈥檆lock News and Panorama, Controller of B香蕉秀 Two and Director of Television.听His book, 鈥淓nough Said: What鈥檚 Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?鈥� was published in the UK and US in September 2016.听He was educated at Stonyhurst College and Merton College Oxford.

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Barbie Zelizer

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, crisis, culture, memory and images. She has authored/edited fifteen books and over 150 articles/essays. Recipient of multiple fellowships, including the American Academy of Arts and Science and the British Academy, her work has appeared in national and global media. Coeditor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, she is past President of the International Communication Association. Her most recent book is The Journalism Manifesto (2021, with Pablo Boczkowski and C.W. Anderson), and she is now working on How the Cold War Drives the News.