Talia Stroud 

Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud holds the E. M. "Ted" Dealey Professorship in the Business of Journalism and is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the School of Journalism and Media, as well as the founding and current Director of the Center for Media Engagement (mediaengagement.org) and the Interim Director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. The Center for Media Engagement seeks to understand and improve the media’s role in a democracy. She is currently co-leading a collaboration between Facebook and the academic community to assess the platform’s effect in the 2020 U.S. presidential election and collaborating on New_ Public, a project to re-envision public life on platforms. Stroud is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Her research on the media’s role in a democracy has received numerous national and international awards, including the International Communication Association (ICA)'s prestigious Outstanding Book Award in 2012 for her book Niche News: The Politics of News Choice, the inaugural Public Engagement Award from the Journalism Studies Division of the ICA in 2019, the 2016 Bill Eadie Distinguished Award for a Scholarly Article from the National Communication Association (NCA), the 2019 and 2011 Michael Pfau Outstanding Article Awards from NCA, and the 2020 Walter Lippmann Best Published Article Award from the American Political Science Association’s Political Communication Section. Stroud serves on the editorial boards of ten academic journals and the advisory boards of SciLine, a part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Social Science Research Council’s Media & Democracy Initiative. Stroud twice received the Outstanding Faculty Member Award from the Communication Studies Graduate Community. She holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.