Barbie Zelizer is Director of the Center for Media at Risk and the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.
A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored or edited sixteen books, including the award-winning About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford, 2010) and Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago, 1998), and close to 200 articles, book chapters and essays. She has two upcoming books: How the Cold War Broke the News (Polity, 2025) and Media and Propaganda in an Age of Disinformation (coedited with Nelson Ribeiro, Routledge, 2025).
Zelizer is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the Europaea Academia. She is a recipient of multiple fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation; Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; the Fulbright Senior Scholar Foundation; Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and an American Council of Learned Societies. A founding co-editor of the academic journal Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, a former president of the International Communication Association and a former Judge of the Peabody Awards for Excellence in Electronic Media, Zelizer is also a media critic, whose work has appeared in The Nation, PBS News Hour, CNN, The Huffington Post, Newsday, Liberation and other media organizations. Her work has been translated into French, Korean, Turkish, Romanian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Portuguese.
Sophie Maddocks is Director of Research and Outreach at the Center for Media at Risk.
An expert on youth digital wellbeing, Sophie’s research has been published in several academic journals and edited volumes. Sophie’s commentary for the Women’s Media Center has appeared across national and international news outlets; she consults for government agencies, nonprofits and tech companies; and she leads digital rights workshops at schools and colleges.
A former high school teacher, guidance counselor and youth worker, Sophie is passionate about collaborating across communities to develop programming that creates healthier, safer, and more equitable environments for youth.
Sophie holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from The New School for Public Engagement where she was a Fulbright Scholar, a PGCE from the University of Warwick, and a BA from the University of Cambridge.
Madison Miller is program coordinator at the Center for Media at Risk and a student in the Master of Liberal Arts program at the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Madison’s research has focused on the relationship of food traditions with cultural heritage and the heritage tourism industry. Madison holds a bachelor’s degree from La Salle University where she studied history and religion with a focus on Islamic feminism. She has worked in multiple sectors including the service industry, as a social media manager and as a Myanmar Peace Corps Volunteer. Outside of Annenberg, Madison is passionate about international travel, street food, analog music and making art.
Visiting Faculty
Moya Bailey is a visiting scholar at the Center for Media at Risk and a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.
Bailey is the founder of the Digital Apothecary and co-founder of the Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collective. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice, and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine.
Bailey is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever-growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).