Spring Symposium on Journalism and Democracy

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’s 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 senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington DC, where he focuses on the intersection of public policy, Islam, and modernity. In 2023, he joined The Islamic Civilization and Societies program at Boston College as a Senior Lecturer. He teaches the course, “Islam and Modernity: The Turkish Experience.” Akyol is the author of Reopening Muslim Minds: A Return to Reason, Freedom, and Tolerance (2021), “Why, As A Muslim, I Defend Liberty” (2021), The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims (2017), and Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (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’s short arrest by the country’s “religion police” because Akyol delivered a public lecture advocating religious freedom.

Riada Asimovic Akyol

Riada Asimovic Akyol is a Journalist, Strategic Initiatives Editor at New
Lines magazine, where she helps shape strategic expansion, oversees the development and realization of special projects, and launch of new products in digital format and multimedia. Her writing on politics from the wider Balkans, religion, culture and gender has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Al-Jazeera, Al-Monitor, The Nation. She has made frequent appearances on international television shows and conferences featuring conversations on Bosnian genocide and related topics. She is also an avid podcaster and founder of “Dignified Resilience.” For New Lines, she channeled her passion for facilitating meaningful conversations to “Good Talk” Instagram Live Series, and currently hosts a weekly “Wider Angle” audio 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 MSNBC contributor, a guest host for the NPR/WBUR-produced news program On Point, and co-host of the weekly Politicon legal news podcast #SistersInLaw. Previously, Kim was the first Washington, DC-based news correspondent for WBUR. She has also served as the Boston Herald’s Washington bureau chief, guest host of C-SPAN’s morning call-in show Washington Journal, and a Supreme Court reporter for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and its sister publications. She has appeared as a political commentator on a host of national and international television and radio networks, including CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS, NPR, Sky News (UK), and CBC News (Canada). Before launching her journalism career, she was a trial and appellate litigation attorney in Boston. 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, 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

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’s 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’s 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. 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 

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 articles and book chapters about religious education and private Muslim schooling in France, and a collaborative article on anthem-related athlete activism. 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’s “Religion in Europe” 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 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. At Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, Gayle is working on his latest project, “PUSHAHEAD: The Story of Edward McCabe and His Dreams to Colonize,” about the true-life story of a Black politician who tried to make Oklahoma into an all-Black state. His writing has been featured in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, Guernica, the Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Pacific Standard, and the Threepenny 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’s 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’s 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 “Kremlin Rising,” “The Man Who Ran Washington,” and, most recently, “The Divider,” 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 “politics of the common good” 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’s 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: When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America; Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line; What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest; Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelicals, and Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip. Her essays have appeared in the Nation, Politico, The Conversation, Salon, and the Washington Post.

Daniel Kreiss

Daniel Kreiss is the Edgar Thomas Cato Distinguished Professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher of the UNC Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. Most recently, Kreiss co-authored Power in Ideas: A Case-Based Argument for Taking Ideas Seriously in Political Communication Research (2021, Cambridge University Press), and has published three books with Oxford University Press that analyze politics and campaigning in the era of platforms. Kreiss co-edits the Oxford University Press book series Journalism and Political Communication Unbound and is an associate editor of Political Communication. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a 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 Vaïsse, was published by Brookings Institution Press (2006) and Odile Jacob (2007).  Prof. Laurence assumed the Directorship of the Clough Center in spring 2022.

Kathryn Jean Lopez

Kathryn Jean Lopez 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. 

Jan-Werner Mueller

Jan-Werner Mueller 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 Constitutional Patriotism (2007), Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe (2011) and What is Populism? (2016), which has been translated into more than 20 languages. 2019 saw the publication of Furcht und Freiheit: Für einen anderen Liberalismus, which won the Bavarian Book Prize; in 2021, Democracy Rules appeared with FSG, Penguin, and Suhrkamp. 

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’s Kennedy School of Government, an Affiliated Professor at Harvard’s 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. 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’s 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 “Beliefs” column, about religion, for The New York Times, and he has also written for publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, GQ, Slate, and many more. He created and hosts Unorthodox, the world’s most popular podcast about Jewish life and culture, with over 6 million downloads to date. More recently, he hosted an eight-part podcast called Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews and antisemitism at Ivy League schools. He is the author of five books, including The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia and, most recently, 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’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Pickard’s 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 The Guardian, The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Harvard Business Review, Jacobin, The Atlantic, and The Nation. He has authored or edited six books, including the award-winning America’s Battle for Media Democracy and Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. 

Heather Cox Richardson

Author of Letters from an American 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, To Make Men Free (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 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’s, DoubleTake, Boston, Slate, The Believer, TriQuarterly, and The Best American Essays.  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 “Chicago Visions and Revisions” 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’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he won the National Communication Association’s 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. 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. 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 The GroundTruth Project, 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 Report for America (which was featured on 60 Minutes last year) and in eight other countries through the newly launched Report for the World program. Previously, Sennott served as the Boston Globe’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. 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. Mr. Thompson's appointment at The New York Times Company followed an eight-year term as Director General of the BBC. He is widely credited with expanding the BBC’s digital reach and overseeing development of the BBC iPlayer. He joined the BBC from Channel 4 where he was Chief Executive from 2002 to 2004. Before Channel 4 he held a series of senior posts at the BBC including Editor of The Nine O’clock News and Panorama, Controller of BBC Two and Director of Television. His book, “Enough Said: What’s Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?” was published in the UK and US in September 2016. He was educated at Stonyhurst College and Merton College Oxford.

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.