July 31, 2025 Thanks to a $2.5M gift from Richard and Leslie Frank in 2024—who endowed the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media in 2020 and enabled the renovation of Richmond Studio—exciting upgrades in the lower level of Gregory Hall began in Spring 2025. This will result in the creation of […]
July 1, 2025 | The News-Gazette I suspect AI will continue to be used to help political strategists in creating, testing and managing campaigns. This means we’ll probably receive even more personalized ads—I’m hopeful that we, as citizens, are able to know what is AI and what is not, and what is truthful and what […]
June 30, 2025 Faculty, graduate students, and recent alumni from the College of Media co-presented various topics of research at the 75th annual International Communication Association Conference—the largest academic conference for communication scholars—on June 12-16, 2025, in Denver, Colorado. The ICA aims to advance the scholarly study of human communication by encouraging and facilitating excellence in academic research worldwide. […]
April 15, 2025 Update May 29, 2025: Congratulations to the students who presented “Uman Tok: Tailoring Hope, Renewing Futures in Sierra Leone” for receiving an award for Outstanding Oral Presentation at the Undergraduate Research Symposium from the Office of Undergraduate Research! Some of these students previously won an award in 2024 for Outstanding Exhibit on this same research […]
March 21, 2025 Advertising faculty and graduate students in the MS advertising and ICR doctoral programs, as well as several alumni, participated in the 2025 annual conference of the American Academy of Advertising, held March 6-9 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Faculty and graduate students participated in eight paper presentations and three panels, discussing research and ideas […]
March 19, 2025 Helen Katz (MS ’86, advertising; PhD ’88, ICR), EVP of Research at Publicis Media, has been named the recipient of the prestigious 2025 Erwin Ephron Demystification Award. This lifetime achievement award honors industry leaders who are exceptional communicators and excel in making complex subjects accessible, embodying the spirit of legendary advertising research guru Erwin Ephron. […]
Email: youngin3@illinois.edu Research Interests I interrogate the politics of popular cultures hiding under the cloak of spectacular glitz, through interdisciplinary approaches within cultural studies. My work invites the readers to (re)visit the power relations of languages in contemporary cinema and the pop music industry or to explore a complicated ecosystem of female fandom. From Seoul, […]
Email: jiwono2@illinois.edu Research Interests Jiwon’s research draws on transnational, feminist, and decolonial STS and critical data and AI studies to examine how power operates across the design, deployment, and governance of sociotechnical systems. She studies how gender, infrastructure, and technological imaginaries shape global AI economies, situating these developments within longer histories of colonialism and capitalism. […]
Email: jc118@illinois.edu Research Interests Recent Publications/ Presentations “Them that Fabricate: Interpretations of Conservative Religions in Independent Film”, Console-ing Passions International Conference. Bloomington, IN. June, 2024 “Mapping Found Footage Tropes in the True Crime Genre”, Popular Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. March, 2024. Courses Taught Academic Roles Awards and Honors
Email: sakshib3@illinois.edu Research Interests Recent Publications/Presentations R Ray, S Bhalla, H Taneja. (2025). Partisan news users in the United States and India on either side seldom use fact checkers. Journal of Communication, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf018 Bhalla, S., Nelson, M. R., & Spikes, M. (2025). Classroom contexts: Teachers talk teaching media literacy. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(2), 37-52. https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2025-17-2-3 […]