CGCS Staff

Director and Adjunct Full Professor of Communication

Monroe Price serves as Director of CGCS and Director of the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research in London. Professor Price is the Joseph and Sadie Danciger Professor of Law and Director of the Howard M. Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society at the Cardozo School of Law, where he served as Dean from 1982 to 1991. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale, where he was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Associate Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court and was an assistant to Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz.

Professor Price was founding director of the Program in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a Member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was deputy director of California Indian Legal Services, one of the founders of the Native American Rights Fund, and author of Law and the American Indian. Among his many books are Media and Sovereignty; Television, The Public Sphere and National Identity; and a treatise on cable television.

• Read the Penn Gazette article about Prof. Price and CGCS.

Associate Director

As Associate Director, Libby supports the development, planning and administration of all CGCS activities, including research efforts, policy work, conferences, and training programs. She also works with Professor Price on the Center's publication initiatives, including the publication of Measuring Press Freedom; Broadcasting, Voice and Accountability; and Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China. In 2006, she received an MA in International Relations, with a concentration in Media and Communications, from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. Prior to graduate school, she worked in international advertising and publishing in Washington, DC. She received her BA from Dartmouth College.

Project Coordinator

As CGCS's Project Coordinator, Laura Schwartz-Henderson manages the center's visiting scholars program, the annual Annenberg-Oxford summer program, and CGCS courses and graduate student outreach. Laura recently moved back to Philadelphia after graduating from McGill University in Montreal, where she obtained an honors BA in International Development and English. At McGill, she concentrated her studies on media policy and development, writing her thesis on broadband infrastructure development in sub-Saharan Africa. She has worked in finance and communications for several local elections, and interned with the San Francisco-based nonprofit One World Children’s fund and the public diplomacy sector of the U.S. Department of State.

Grants Coordinator

As CGCS's Grants Coordinator, Drew helps backstop CGCS's government and foundation funded projects.  Drew was a finance and accounting major from Northeastern University in Boston, where he also spent time working in the Grants Department at Harvard Medical School.  He grew up outside of Philadelphia.

Research Project Manager

Briar Smith is a Research Project Manager at CGCS.  While a graduate student at Annenberg School for Communication, Briar worked closely on a number of CGCS’s China initiatives, including teaching at the Penn-in-Beijing summer school and authoring a chapter in the Center’s publication of Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China.  Her research interests include international cultural communications with particular focus on China and the Middle East, and the cultural politics of the body in contemporary Islamic contexts.  Prior to joining CGCS full time, Briar was Lead Project Manager at a market research firm in Philadelphia. Briar has a Master’s degree in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Chinese Language and Literature and Psychology from Swarthmore College. 

Post Doctoral Research Fellow

Babak Rahimi is the 2012-2013 Post Doctoral Research Fellow for CGCS’ Iran Media Program. Dr. Rahimi is an Assistant Professor in the Program for the Study of Religion at UC San Diego’s Department of Literature. He received a Ph.D from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, in October 2004. Rahimi has also studied at the University of Nottingham, where he obtained a M.A. in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, and London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, 2000-2001. Rahimi has written numerous articles on culture, religion and politics and regularly writes on contemporary Iraqi and Iranian politics. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the national endowment for the Humanities and Jean Monnet Fellowship at the European University Institute, and was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC and a visiting scholar at the Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Rahimi’s current research project is on the relationship between digital culture, politics and religion in post-revolutionary Iran.

Research Project Manager

Adam Levin serves as Project Director for CGCS's USAID-funded Afghanistan Media Development and Empowerment Project (AMDEP), and works on a number of other center initiatives, including the World Bank infoDev ICT capacity-building program and the Price International Media Law Moot Court program.

Adam's work in Afghanistan has centered around developing a media law and policy training program, launching a bilingual media law moot court competition, and establishing the Afghanistan Media Defense Lawyers Committee.

Adam previously worked as a political risk and security consultant and as a research assistant at NATO's Parliamentary Assembly in Brussels and the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He received a Master's degree and graduated with distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.

Media and Democracy Research Fellow

Amelia Arsenault serves as the George Gerbner Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School.  She recently completed her doctoral work on the subject of information and state power in southern Africa at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School.  While at USC she also served as the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Fellow to Manuel Castells and as a Research Associate at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.  Her research interests include: communication and power; media and ICT ownership; media and ICT for development; and public diplomacy.  She holds a B.A. in Film and History from Dartmouth College and an MSc in Global Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to graduate school, Amelia worked as the film coordinator for the Zimbabwe International Film Festival Trust in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Her publications include: “The Structure and Dynamics of Global Multi-Media Business Networks,” International Journal of Communication (with Manuel Castells, 2008); “Switching Power: Rupert Murdoch and The Global Business Of Media Politics. A Sociological Analysis,” International Sociology (with Manuel Castells, 2008); “Conquering the Minds, Conquering Iraq: The Social Production of Misinformation in the United States.  A Case Study,” Information, Communication, and Society (with Manuel Castells, 2006); “Moving From Monologue to Dialogue to Collaboration: The Three Layers of Public Diplomacy,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (with Geoffrey Cowan, 2008); and Public Diplomacy 2.0. In Philip Seib (Ed.) Toward a New Public Diplomacy: Redirecting U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).