Professor
Professor
Dr. Ham joined Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising in 2010 as a tenure-track faculty. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Ham worked in the advertising industry for ten years as an account executive, account planner, and Internet marketing consultant at LG AD (HS AD), a major advertising agency in Korea. During the time, he managed diverse integrated marketing communication projects for clients such as LG electronics, Baskin Robbins, and many others, collaborating with diverse domestic and international agencies, media, and digital vendors including Google Double Click, Naver, Dentsu, and so forth.
He has served as Director of Graduate Studies in Advertising (2020-2023); Executive Director, Global Professional Training Program (2011-); Associate Editor, International Journal of Advertising and Asian Journal of Communication; Vice President, American Academy of Advertising (AAA); Chair of Research Committee, American Academy of Advertising (AAA; 2021-2023); Chairs in Special Topic, Professional Freedom & Responsibility (PF&R), and Co-Chair of Pre-Conference, Advertising Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC; 2022-); and Vice President, Korean American Communication Association (2015-2017).
2024 Runner-Up, Best Paper of the Year, 2023, Journal of Interactive Advertising, recognized at the Annual Conference of American Academy of Advertising (AAA), Portland, OR.
2024 Adviser, Dissertation Award (Woojin Kim), American Academy of Advertising (AAA), Annual conference, Portland, OR.
2023 Best Reviewer of the Year of 2022, International Journal of Advertising, recognized at the Annual Conference of International Conference on Research in Advertising (ICORIA), European Advertising Academy.
2023 Best Paper of the Year, 2022, Journal of Interactive Advertising, recognized at the Annual Conference of American Academy of Advertising (AAA), Denver, CO.
2023 Charles H. Sandage Scholar in Advertising Research, Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2022 James W. Carey Faculty Fellow for Research, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2022 Most Influential Articles in 2021 by the editors of journals of the American Academy of Advertising (AAA)
2022 Best Paper of the Year, 2021, Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, recognized at the Annual Conference of American Academy of Advertising (AAA), St. Petersburg, FL.
2022 Best Paper of the Year, 2021, Journal of Interactive Advertising, recognized at the Annual Conference of American Academy of Advertising (AAA), St. Petersburg, FL.
2021 Best Research Paper, 2nd place, Global Colloquium, Korea Advertising Society (KAS), Kangwon-Do, Korea
2019 Research Fellowship Award, American Academy of Advertising (AAA), Annual conference, Dallas, TX.
2018 Top faculty research paper, open research category, Advertising division, 2nd place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Annual conference, Washington D.C.
2017 The fourth most read/downloaded article of the year in 2016, International Journal of Advertising, recognized at the International Conference on Research in Advertising (ICORIA), Annual conference, European Advertising Academy, Ghent, Belgium.
2017 Top faculty research paper, Advertising division, 3rd place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Annual conference, Chicago, IL.
2016 The second most read/downloaded article of the year in 2015, International Journal of Advertising, recognized at the International Conference on Research in Advertising (ICORIA), Annual conference, European Advertising Academy, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
2015 Top faculty research paper, Public Relations division, 4th place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Annual conference, San Francisco, CA.
2014 Top faculty research paper, Advertising division, 3rd place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Annual conference, Montreal, Canada.
2012 Top faculty research paper, Mass Communication & Society division, 4th place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Annual conference, Chicago, IL.
2011 Top faculty research paper, Advertising division, 2nd place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Annual conference, St. Louis, MO.
2009 Top research paper in Scholar-to-Scholar session, International Communication Association (ICA) Annual conference, Chicago, IL.
Dr. Ham has explored how consumers cope with, and steel themselves against, diverse persuasion tactics in digital, throughout the lens of consumers’ marketplace metacognition, social intelligence, persuasion inference, media literacy, and mind perception. His research topic includes, but not limited to, native advertising, online video advertising, online behavioral advertising, corporate social responsibility, and political advertising literacy. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and/or book chapters in advertising, marketing, and communication. Currently, his research focuses primarily on consumers’ coping mechanism with data-driven advertising, algorithmic advertising, and artificial intelligence marketing.
Associate Professor Emerita
Senior Lecturer
Steve currently teaches the Introduction to Advertising course, a Weston Exploration Freshman Discovery advertising class and special topic Advertising Campaign courses with national and global client brands. Steve is the faculty advisor for the largest American Advertising Federation (AAF) student chapter in the country, NSAC advisor, and member/past chair of the AAF National Academic Committee. He has also served on the AAF Board of Directors. On campus, he is a member and past Chair of the University of Illinois Career Services Council, serves on the campuswide Coordinating Committee for Illinois Leadership and is on the University of Illinois Undergraduate Sub-Committee for Campus Discipline. Additional service includes:
He and his wife, Kristen, have two daughters—Madison and Kennedy.
Bears. Cubs. Yankees. Illini. Golf. Warhol. Classic Rock. Espresso. Parmigiano Reggiano. Cabernet Sauvignon.
Associate Professor
Ng is a media researcher with certified industrial training (Galvanize) in data science and database tools. Broadly speaking, her research examines technology use, social media, and information diffusion using large-scale, unstructured data and computational methods. Particularly, she explores three distinctive yet interrelated components of the web: user behavior, embedded structures, and content framing.
She works closely with United Nations Global Pulse, an innovation initiative of the UN Secretary-General to harness big data and emerging communication technologies for sustainable development and humanitarian action. Before earning a Ph.D., she worked as a news artist at National Geographic Magazine and The Seattle Times and a data reporter for The Center for Public Integrity. During her doctoral study, she was an advanced analytics intern at Pew Research Center’s Data Labs. She was born and raised in Hong Kong.
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies (ICR)
Derek Long is a historian of media industries, specializing in the Hollywood studio system, film distribution, and digital approaches to cinema history. His first book, Playing the Percentages: How Film Distribution Made the Hollywood Studio System (University of Texas Press, 2024), examines the history of film distribution as a dynamic struggle over booking, marketing, and sales practices in the 1910s and 1920s. His articles have been published in Cinema Journal, Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, The Velvet Light Trap, [in]Transition, among other journals and anthologies.
His work also applies digital datasets and tools to questions of media history. As a member of the Project Arclight team, he helped to map “trends” in media history to quantitatively assess the cultural influence of stars, films, studios, the trade press, and other institutions. As creator and manager of Early Cinema History Online (ECHO), a database based on the extensive work of film historians Einar Lauritzen and Gunnar Lundquist, he has indexed and compiled filmographic information covering over 35,000 individual films released in the United States from 1908–1920.
Here at the College of Media, he has taught MACS courses in world cinema, production, film theory, animation history, and graduate media historiography. His other research interests include animation, videographic criticism, early cinema, broadcasting history, avant-garde and cult cinema, and low-budget filmmaking.
Senior Lecturer
Dr. Heuman’s research explores media industries and regulation (especially television), with an emphasis on the regulation of media work. His different projects come together in a concern for the cultural life of media industries and their regulation (from content regulation as a style of cultural criticism to the gendered culture of television writers’ rooms), pursuing often neglected documents and discourses (from submissions to administrative and legal proceedings to how-to manuals for online investors and radio and television writers). His current projects follow the historical formation of the professional broadcast writer, from law and policy to contract and organization.
Dr. Heuman’s teaching ranges widely across the field of media studies, including courses in media industries; media law; media history; media theory; and media genre, narrative, and style.
Alongside these main lines of research and teaching, he’s also glad to think and talk about a broader range of interests across the field of media studies, and across the varied forms, genres, and periods of media.
Associate Professor
Recipient of the 2020 Illinois Student Government Teaching Excellence Award and named the 2014 Associated Press Media Editors Innovator of the Year for College Students, Stretch Ledford has worked as a journalist telling stories through audio, photographs and video in more than 55 countries. His career began as a staff photojournalist for The State (Columbia, SC), The Fayetteville (NC) Observer, The Durham (NC) Morning Herald, The St. Petersburg (FL) Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) and The Commission, the journal of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board.
As a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer, Ledford has been published by The Atlantic, Consumer Reports, Health, Ladies Home Journal, Mens Journal, Modern Maturity, Newsweek, Outside, POZ, Readers Digest, Smithsonian, Time, USA Weekend, The Washington Post Sunday Magazine, the Washingtonian, The Associated Press, Black Star, Knight Ridder/Tribune News, United Press International, The Wall Street Journal, Advanced Micro Devices, Arnold Worldwide, Bank One, CNN, Continental Airlines, Cryolife, Deere & Company, Dominion, DuPont, Freddie Mac, Genworth, Geico, Kindercare Learning Centers, KPMG, The Martin Agency, Mazda, Nike, Ogilvy & Mather, Ping, the Rocky Mountain School of Design, the Royal Bank of Canada, Ryder, Sanofi-Aventis, Shell, Sports Illustrated, Tillamook Creamery, Trigon/Blue Cross, the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Virginia Department of Transportation, Wal-Mart, Washington Mutual Bank, Whole Foods Market, XCel Energy, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Food for the Hungry, the Grossman Burn Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, Junior Achievement Worldwide, MercyCorps, Project Angel Heart, Project HOPE and the YMCA.
Since joining the Illinois faculty in 2011, Ledford’s work has been featured online and/or broadcast by major news organizations around the world, including NPR’s Morning Edition, NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams, the Today show, Time, the Huffington Post, The Weather Channel, the BBC, The Atlantic, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail (Toronto), the Guardian (London), the Nippon Television Network (Japan), Gawker, Vice and Forbes.
Galleries and museums in Colorado, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska and Virginia have displayed Ledford’s photographs. His work has been recognized with awards from the National Press Photographers Association, the Online News Association, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the New York Art Directors Club, the International Photography Awards and Communication Arts Magazine’s Photography Annual.
We fragile humans are more prone to label one another, to place one another into groups and to revert to the insularity of our various tribes than we are to recognize our innate commonalities. Doing so is easy, risk free and readily dismissed as “just human nature.”
But there also exists a deeper human nature that longs for recognition by and connection with the phenomenological Other. If there’s any single motivating factor behind my work it is my desire for it to provide a pathway for that deeper Self to recognize the connectedness it shares with the Other. Psychologists would call this “catalyzing humanistic empathy;” for journalists, it’s “promoting civil discourse.”
Since I began making photographs as a journalist in 1983, my cameras have taken me to more than 50 countries – places with exotic sounding names like Ouagadougou and as isolated geographically as the Sangihe Islands in the western Pacific. I have photographed Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, Mother Teresa in an earthquake zone and both Bill and Hillary Clinton (and Donald Trump) on the campaign trail. I have photographed people on the verge of starvation, several women giving birth and any number of weddings. I have been detained by police or military units in three countries as I worked to make photographs that would get below surface appearances and tell meaningful stories.
Throughout, my goal is to find, capture and produce stories that foster the shared sense of community that I believe defines our deepest human nature.
Professor Emeritus
Johnson started his journalism career as a staff photojournalist at The News-Gazette in Champaign and has been teaching at the University since 1988. Johnson’s work has been published in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, USA Today, Newsday and others.
Johnson was the editor of the book, C-U in Seven Plus, A Week (Plus a little bit more) in the Life of Champaign-Urbana. He has won prizes in the Horizon Interactive awards, National Press Photographers Association Pictures of the Year and the Telly Awards. His multimedia project This Bond won Best Faculty Creative Project from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Visual Communication Division. His current work uses photojournalism as a methodology to document the unseen in the seen.
Johnson has received more than 60 national, regional and state awards for his photojournalism, multimedia and videos. Johnson has received recognition for his teaching including being selected as a Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Scholar and as Faculty Member of the Year from the University of Illinois Dads Association. He was twice the head of the Visual Communications Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and was vice president of the Illinois Press Photographers Association. He has served the department of journalism at the University as director of graduate studies, associate department head and as department head.
Knight Chair Professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting
Professor Brant Houston holds the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois. Houston teaches investigative and advanced reporting in the Department of Journalism in the College of Media at Illinois.
He also oversees the online newsroom at Illinois, CU-CitizenAccess.org, which serves as a lab for digital innovation and data journalism.
Houston became the chair in 2007 after serving for more than a decade as the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a 5,000-member organization, and as a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining IRE, he was an award-winning investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 17 years.
Houston is the author of six editions of the textbook, Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide, and co-author of the fourth, fifth and sixth editions of The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook, and Changing Models for Journalism: Reinventing the Newsroom. He co-founded the Global Investigative Journalism Network in 2003 and serves as chair of its board of directors. He also co-founded the Institute for Nonprofit News in 2009. He has taught and spoken about investigative and computer-assisted reporting at newsrooms and universities in 25 countries.
Currently he is working on projects involving nonprofit journalism newsrooms, digital tools for news-gathering, and new business models for journalism.
