Elihu Katz

Professor Elihu Katz was the Trustee Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and also the Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Katz attended Columbia University, where he studied sociology and earned a B.A. (1948), an M.A. (1950), and a Ph.D. (1956). He is a distinguished visiting scholar at the University of Southern California, associate professor at the University of Chicago, visiting professor at Columbia University, and scientific director of the Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research in Israel. He was awarded honorary degrees from the Universities of Ghent, Haifa, Montreal, and Paris and received many international awards. His interests center on sociology and social history of media of mass communication with special attention to conceptualizing media effects. Katz has written on diffusion of innovation, media events, sociology of leisure, culture policy, bureaucracy and the public, Jewishness of Israelis. Currently, he is interested in classic texts of media research.