Margaret Yee Man Ng

Associate Professor Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background 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, […]

Derek Long

Associate ProfessorDirector of Graduate Studies (ICR) Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background 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 […]

Josh Heuman

Senior Lecturer Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background 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 […]

Charles “Stretch” Ledford

Associate Professor Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background 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 […]

Brian Johnson

Professor Emeritus Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background 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. Research and Creative Endeavor […]

Brant Houston

Knight Chair Professor in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting Affiliations Background 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 […]

James Hay

Professor and Interim Head Affiliations Education Course Specialties Research and Creative Endeavor My research concerns a wide variety of media and contexts—from popular media of the 20th century (cinema, television, telephony, radio) to “new media” and forms of “media convergence” to technologies and appliances that are not usually considered “media” (such as cars, buildings, clothes, […]

Victor Font

Senior Lecturer Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background Victor Font founded his own audiovisual company in the ’90s. He has been in the production business for more than 25 years. As principal of Prodimag his professional work has involved direction, production, postproduction, and services for worldwide production companies.  In 2004 he founded Intermedio, a cinema distribution […]

Kenneth R. Erdey

Technical Coordinator for Broadcast Operations Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background Erdey previously worked as a news photographer/editor for the television station WCIA in Champaign, Illinois. Other stations include CLTV, WFLD-Fox32, WCIU, CNN Chicago Bureau, all based in Chicago. He is a current board member of the Illinois Journalism Education Association and has served as the Executive […]

Leon Dash

Swanlund Chair Professor Emeritus Affiliations Education Course Specialties Background Leon DeCosta Dash, Jr., born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, grew up in Harlem and the Bronx. He graduated from Howard University with a Bachelor of Arts in History and a minor in Political Science in 1968. Before graduating, he held an internship as a newsroom copy […]

College of Media
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