CGCS Affiliates

CGCS works with a global network of academics and practitioners on all of our research and public policy initiatives. CGCS affiliates are engaged in media policy, the role of the media in conflict and post-conflict environments, and questions of democratization and development, among other issues. 

CGCS’s affiliates teach at our annual Annenberg-Oxford Institute, participate in Annenberg-based and international conferences , spend time at Annenberg as visiting scholars, and contribute to our research, public policy and publishing initiatives.

Some of our affiliates are highlighted on this page.  

Susan Abbott, formerly Associate Director of CGCS, now serves as Deputy Director for Programs with Internews.

As Associate Director of CGCS, Abbott worked with CGCS Director Monroe E. Price on increasing international and comparative research and activities, developing relationships with international partners, and managing projects such as the USAID-funded Jordan Media Strengthening Program and Researching Attitudes Towards Conflict and Peace in Darfur. Abbott played an active role in coordinating CGCS partnerships on publications with the World Bank Institute and the Global Forum for Media Development.

Prior to joining CGCS, Abbott worked as a consultant for Central European University in Budapest, where she helped establish the CEU Center for Media and Communications Studies. Prior to this she was a program officer in the Media Development Division at the International Research & Exchanges Board, in Washington, DC, on the USAID-funded Serbia Professional Media Program.

Kate Coyer serves as Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University.

Coyer most recently completed a two year post-doctoral research fellowship with the Annenberg School and CEU, where she spent one semester per year at each institution.

Coyer’s research centers on a comparative study of community broadcasting policy among the European Union member states, with special attention afforded to the newest EU members in Central and Eastern Europe.  Community broadcasting remains an emergent sector representing an important and often overlooked site of innovation in communication, community building and fostering of the democratic process. Her research seeks to provide a better framework for understanding the diversity and breadth of the sector and the basis for consideration of any potential role European Union initiatives could play in support of the movement for community broadcasting.

Iginio Gagliardone is Senior Researcher at the Stanhope Centre for Media and Communications Policy Research and CGCS. He serves as the lead researcher for CGCS's work on public opinion in Darfur, where he is working to design and implement a research project to assess the perception of the conflict and the peace process.

Gagliardone has six years of international experience in the field of communication for development with a particular focus on Eastern Africa (Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda). He has coordinated large scale programs for the use of ICTs for development, developing for example a set of standards for the training of African teachers in the use and teaching of ICTs in secondary schools.

Gagliardone is currently finalizing his PhD in Media and Communication at the London School of Economics.

Douglas Griffin, director of Albany Associates (UK), serves as Senior Legal Advisor for the Jordan Media Strengthening Program, where he advises on the establishment of a media law curriculum, the development of an annual media law and policy institute, and other law and policy issues.  

Griffin is an attorney specializing in media and communications issues.  Recently, he has been working in the United Arab Emirates on content regulation, in Sudan on a public information campaign regarding the Darfur Peace Agreement, and in Iraq on capacity building projects with the media and telecommunications regulator. 

Griffin was the lawyer for the Media Development and Regulatory Advisory Team that Albany Associates deployed in Iraq.  In that capacity, he drafted codes and regulations applying to Iraqi media and advised the Iraqi interim and transitional governments on the role of independent regulators of media and telecommunications. 

Prior to his position in Iraq, Griffin worked with Internews Europe where he assisted media rights advocates in developing countries and was in private practice for five years with the international law firm of Latham & Watkins in New York, Moscow and Paris representing clients on a variety of media and communications matters.

Ellen Hume is the Annenberg Fellow in Civic Media.

In this role, Ms. Hume is based at the Central European University’s Center for Media and Communications Studies (CMCS) in Budapest, Hungary, where she will continue her civic media work and participate in research projects undertaken by the Annenberg School and Central European University.

Ms. Hume was previously the Research Director at the Center for Future Civic Media in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the second Annenberg Fellow to work with CEU.

Hongmei Li is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication, Georgia State University. She is also a George Gerbner Post-Doc Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania in 2008-2010.

In addition to conducting research and teaching at Annenberg, she works on China-related projects with Professor Monroe Price at the Center for Global Communication Studies. She co-organized the 7th Chinese Internet Research Conference with Monroe Price and Lokman Tsui in May 2009.
 
Hongmei Li obtained her Ph.D. from USC Annenberg in December 2006. Her reserach interests focus on advertising and consumer culture, nationalism, cultural identity, gender studies, nation branding, culture of new technology and Chinese culture, politics and society. She has presented at many national and international conferences. She has published recently in Critical Studies in Media Communication, the International Journal of Communication, and Public Relations Review. Several of her book chapters have also been scheduled to be published in peer-reviewed books soon.

Dr. Jiang Min is Assistant Professor of Communication at UNC Charlotte. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of mass communication, new media technology, global media and research methods. Her research focuses on the restructuring of the Chinese state-public relationship in the digital age. Specifically, her research involves Chinese online civic and political participation (authoritarian deliberation), Chinese e-government, ICT and media policies in China, and new media for social change. Currently, she is working on several research projects: 1) official and grassroots discourses on Chinese blogosphere; 2) Chinese online collective incidents; 3) Google Maps-based interactive online discourse; and 4) online licensing and tracking of translated materials with Yeeyan and Creative Commons.

Jiang received her Ph.D. in Communication from Purdue University in 2007. Her dissertation focuses on Chinese government networks, authoritarian deliberation, and civic/political participation on Chinese Internet. Prior to pursuing her doctor’s degree in the U.S., Jiang worked as an international news journalist/editor for BTV and CCTV as well as a movie production assistant for Kill Bill I in her native country of China.

Shawn Powers is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he works closely with the Center on International Media Education. He has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism London Program and a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is currently a fellow at CGCS. He earned his Ph.D. from USC Annenberg in 2009 where he studied and wrote about the geopolitical uses of news and information by international actors. Shawn's research interests include mass media and society, new and social media technologies, diasporic communities, globalization and traditional and public diplomacy. He has conducted field research in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern and Western Europe and North America.

Shawn's work has been published in several journals, including: Media, War & Conflict, Global Media & Communication, Ethnopolitics and Media Development. In 2007, Shawn was the co-recipient of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to study global news broadcasters and in 2008 Shawn helped design and managed CPD's evaluation of Alhurra, the US-supported international broadcaster in the Middle East. His current projects include revising his dissertation into a book on how the Al Jazeera Network has helped Qatar transition from a "micro-state" to an influential "network-state," a comparative analysis of how different international broadcasters report news of China, and a case study of exemplar uses of social media for development and good governance in Asia and the Middle East.

Nicole Stremlau is Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford.

Stremlau holds a PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. Her research interests center on the role of media in transitional and post-conflict environments, and she has conducted field work in Ethiopia, Somaliland, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda. Her dissertation was titled The Press and the Consolidation of Power in Ethiopia and Uganda.

Stremlau received her MA degree from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK) in politics and economics and her BA degree from Wesleyan University.

Stefaan Verhulst is Chief of Research at the Markle Foundation. He was the founder and director of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP) at Oxford University, as well as senior research fellow at the Centre for Socio Legal Studies. In that capacity he was appointed the socio-legal research fellow at Wolfson College (Oxford). In addition, he was the Unesco Chairholder in Communication Law and Policy for the UK.

Before his move to Oxford in 1996, Verhulst served as a lecturer on communications law and policy issues in Belgium and founder and co-director of the International Media and info-comms Policy and Law studies (IMPS) at the School of Law, University of Glasgow. He has served as consultant to various international and national organizations including the Council of Europe, European Commission, Unesco, UNDP, USAID and DFID.

His numerous publications include: In Search of the Self: Conceptual Approaches to Internet Self Regulation (Routledge, 2001), Convergence in European Communications Regulation (Blackstone, 1999), EC Media Law and Policy (AWL, 1998), Legal Responses to the Changing Media (OUP, 1998) and Broadcasting Reform in India (OUP, 1998). He is also the founder and editor of the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and the Communications Law in Transition Newsletter.

Augusto Valeriani (Phd) is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the department of Politics, Institution and History at the University of Bologna (Italy) where he lectures in Mass Media and International Politics.  Augusto has published many articles, in Italian and English, on journalistic culture, mass media systems and international politics, with a focus on the Middle East. He is author of the 2005 monograph Il giornalismo arabo (Arab Journalism) and co-editor of the 2009 volume Un Hussein alla Casa Bianca (A Hussein at the White House) on the Arab Media representations of Obama Presidential Campaign. Augusto translated, edited and wrote the foreword for Philip Hammond’s Italian edition of Media, War and Postmodernity (Routledge, 2008).

Augusto spent the fall 2009 semester at CGCS, where he explored the transformation of international politics and its journalistic representation in the new media environment.

Guobin Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is also a faculty member in the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Sociology of Columbia University. He has published on a wide range of social issues in China, including the internet and civil society, environmental NGOs, the 1989 student movement, the Red Guard Movement, and collective memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. His books include The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009), Re-Envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Reform China (edited with Ching-Kwan Lee, 2007),  China's Red Guard Generation: Loyalty, Dissent, and Nostalgia, 1966-1999 (under contract, Columbia University Press), and Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (Library of Chinese Classics in English Translation, Beijing, 2003). 

Yang has a Ph. D. in English Literature with a specialty in Literary Translation from Beijing Foreign Studies University (1993) and a second Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University (2000). His personal website can be found here.

Adnan A. Zulfiqar is currently completing his Ph.D. in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania where his research focuses on, among other things, the articulation of Islamic law in militant propaganda, the use of media by South Asian Muslim movements and legal reform in the developing world.  At CGCS, Adnan's work will focus on the intersection of Islamic law and public policy as it pertains to regulation of the media, with specific emphasis on Pakistan.

Adnan received his Juris Doctor in Law from the University of Pennsylvania, his M.A.L.S. in International Affairs from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Religion and Anthropology from Emory University.  Adnan has been a Fellow at the Truman National Security Project and the Salzburg Global Seminar, previously served as a staffer in the United States Senate and was the Team Leader on the Malidivian Penal Code Reform Project.

Sahana Udupa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. She has research interests in news production, mediation studies, media regulation, mediated urbanism and postcolonial theory. Her current project explores the intersections between news production, urban expansion and mediated religious practices in India. Her doctoral research at the National Institute of Advanced Studies examined the dynamics of bilingual news field and urban politics in the globalizing city of Bangalore in India, and how new ideas of news shape and get shaped by a deeply fractured urban landscape. She was a Spring 2010 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Global Communication Studies. Her articles have been published in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Economic and Political Weekly, India in Transition series (published by CASI, UPenn), e-social sciences and some are forthcoming in American Ethnologist and South Asian History and Culture, among others.