Pizza & Public Affairs: Johanna Dunaway

The Pizza & Public Affairs series invites students and faculty from across campus to enjoy free pizza and engage in meaningful conversations with guest speakers, whether a public official, civic leader, public affairs practitioner, or polarization expert. Speakers will share with students how they have achieved successful policy or program outcomes by building coalitions and communicating in a way that bridges division.

Pizza & Public Affairs is part of the Common Ground Project, a collaborative effort between the Reilly Center and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR) to promote civic engagement, bipartisan dialogue, and trust in democratic institutions.

Faculty: We encourage you to share this announcement with your students and your network!

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Johanna L. Dunaway received her Ph.D. in political science from Rice University in 2006. She is currently a professor of political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and serves as research director of the Institute for Democracy, Journalism and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining Syracuse, she was a member of the faculty at Texas A and M University. Earlier in her career, she was a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and, from 2008 to 2015, held a joint appointment in Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and Department of Political Science.

Professor Dunaway’s research and teaching focus on news media and politics, with particular attention to political communication and the ways in which evolving media environments shape news consumption, political knowledge, attitudes, and democratic engagement. Her scholarship has been published in leading journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Political Communication, Information, Communication and Society, Public Opinion Quarterly, and PLoS One.

She is the coauthor of Home Style Opinion: How Local Newspapers Can Slow Polarization, written with Joshua Darr and Matthew Hitt, which examines the role of local journalism in mitigating partisan polarization. She also coauthored News and Democratic Citizens in a Mobile Era with Kathleen Searles, a study of how mobile technologies are transforming political information environments, and is part of the author team for The House that Fox News Built? Representation, Political Accountability, and the Rise of Partisan Cable News, coauthored with Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson, and Ryan J. Vander Wielen. Her work continues to advance scholarly understanding of media change and its implications for democratic accountability and civic life.

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