Afsaruddin is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.  Her research interests include Islamic religious and political thought; Islamic intellectual history; Qur’an and hadith; and gender in Islam.  She is the author and editor of seven books, including Contemporary Issues in Islam (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and the award-winning Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought(Oxford University Press, 2013), which is currently being translated into Bahasa Indonesian. Professor Afsaruddin was previously the Kraemer Middle East Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the College of William and Mary (2012) and a visiting scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (2003).  Her research has been funded by grants awarded, among others, by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which named her a Carnegie Scholar in 2005.

Bas is a PhD candidate in the Media School. Her research interests lie at the intersection of media (both traditional and new) and democracy. She has investigated the broad concept of informed citizenship in experimental research to assess what might be driving information acquisition divides between more and less disadvantaged members of society. More, she has been working on how social media images of social protests might motivate citizens for collective action. She has published on journals such as, Journal of Communication and Communication Research. ​

Bensemra is Reuters’ Chief Photographer, North-West Africa. In 2017, The Guardian named her agency photographer of the year. Working in the Middle East and North Africa, Zohra specializes in covering countries suffering from internal conflict, such as social, economic, and humanitarian issues. She enjoys working on stories about the struggle for citizenship and human rights against dominant political forces. More recently she covered the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the Rohingya refugee crisis and the drought in Somalia.

Castronova is a Professor of Media at Indiana University and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He specializes in the study of games, technology, and society. Notable works include Wildcat Currency: The Virtual Transformation of the Economy (Yale 2014), Virtual Economies: Analysis and Design (with Vili Lehdonvirta, MIT 2014), Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago 2005), Exodus to the Virtual World (Palgrave 2007). Castronova was born as Edward Bird in 1962, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1995, and took his wife’s name on marrying in 2000. He has two sons, two god-children and a beagle named Tilly. Castronova thinks God is a game designer: Get to Heaven for the win.

Collins is a PhD student in the Media School at Indiana University – Bloomington. His past research was mainly situated in a humanities approach that examined cult and exploitation films, masculinity, nostalgia, and representations of Evangelical Christians in film and television. Currently, his research is moving towards innovative ways of examining Evangelical Christian media and audiences through using both qualitative and quantitative social science research methods. Collins earned both his MA in cultural studies and his BA in film studies and history at the University of North Texas. He grew up in a Southern Baptist household and church most of his life in Fort Worth, Texas but he currently does not identify as Christian.

Evans Comfort is an Assistant Professor in the Media School at Indiana University. Her research focuses on environmental communication, particularly the role of NGOs in influencing news about environmental issues. Evans Comfort has been published in numerous journals, including her most recent publications, “From Ignored to Banner Story: The Role of Natural Disasters in Influencing the Newsworthiness of Climate Change in the Philippines” (2017), “Journalistic Norms, Cultural Values, and Coverage of Climate Change in the Philippines” (2016), and “Shark Week and the Rise of Infotainment in Science Documentaries” (2015).  In 2015, she and her coauthors won the top faculty paper award in the Mass Communication & Society division of AEJMC. Evans Comfort received her PhD from the University of North Carolina in 2016, previously working as a news reporter before returning to academia.

Dupree is the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church. A native of North Carolina and son of a tobacco farmer, Charlie has served congregations in eastern North Carolina and the legendary Woodstock, New York. Charlie is also a lifelong artist and musician, having shown his art locally, published multiple pieces of music, as well as a spiritual memoir, “Practicing Imperfection: A Priest’s Journey through Meditation, Messing Up, and Ministry” (Wipf & Stock). He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Ministry in Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary. He is dedicated to helping others know themselves more fully and to helping others understand the need of and use for beauty, silence, mystery, and creativity.

Grabe is the Associate Dean of the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. She came to IU in 1995 as a faculty member in the former School of Journalism and moved to the Department of Telecommunications in 2006 where she served as the Graduate Director from 2007 to 2010. Her work mostly focuses on how media images affect our understanding of the world we live in. Her book Image Bite Politics: News and the Visual Framing of Elections (with Erik Bucy, 2009), received the 2010 Distinguished Book Award from the International Communication Association. Grabe was born and raised in South Africa, where she worked as a television news documentary producer during the State of Emergency in the mid-1980s.

Graves is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at IU. Graves works on medieval Islamic visual culture and nineteenth-century art from the Islamic world, focusing primarily on the plastic arts especially ceramics and metalworks. Additionally, Graves embeds her work within frameworks of Orientalism, historiography and Islamic art master-narratives. Graves’ monograph, Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament and Architecture in Medieval Islam, will be published by Oxford University Press this summer, and she has published many other articles including “Islam and Visual Art” (2015), which was published in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the Arts. Prior to completing her PhD in the History of Art at University of Edinburgh in 2010, Graves received her M.Sc. in 2005 and her MA in 2002 from University of Edinburgh. 

Mason is director and professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s Center on Religion & the Professions. Her research and teaching centers on the religious literacy of professionals, especially journalists. During her two decades leading Religion News Association, she raised nearly $20 million for training and tools such as  ReligionStylebook.com and ReligionLink.com.  As publisher of Religion News Service, the world’s only non-sectarian wire service exclusively covering religion, she led a multi-million dollar expansion that converted RNS from a for-profit to non-profit company, quadrupled monthly online traffic, created five local religion sites, garnered unprecedented industry honors for RNS and oversaw the rebuilding of  ReligionNews.com.  Mason’s work includes Investigating Religion: An Investigative Reporter’s Guide (with Amy White, 2013), and  Reporting on Religion: A Stylebook on Journalism’s Best Beat, 2nd edition (2016).  Mason  earned an MSJ at Northwestern and a PhD in Mass Communication from Ohio University.

McKay is an author, journalist and commentator from Derry, in Northern Ireland.   Her work has won several awards and she is currently contributing as a freelancer to the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New York Times and the Irish Times. Her journalism has been widely anthologized, including in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing and the Penguin Book of Great Irish Reportage. Her books include Bear in Mind These Dead (Faber 2007), Sophia’s Story (Gill, 1998), and Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Blackstaff, 2000), this last being a portrait of the community from which she comes. She also co-founded the Belfast Rape Crisis Centre in 1981 and directed the National Women’s Council of Ireland from 2009 to 2012.

Midberry is an assistant professor in The Media School’s Journalism unit. Her research focuses on ethical issues related to the visual representation of vulnerable populations and investigates affective and behavioral responses to imagery of marginalized people. She currently teaches Visual Communication and Photojournalism Reporting courses. Midberry’s recent publications include “Photos of Breastfeeding in Uniform: Contesting Discourses of Masculinity, Nationalism, and the Military” (2017), “Photos of the Day Online Galleries: Representing a more Nuanced World” (2017), and “’Only Image I Ever See’: U.S. media consumer’s perceptions of Iraqis” (2017). She earned her PhD in media and communication from Temple University and holds an MA in Near Eastern studies from New York University and a BA in journalism from Messiah College. Previous to her academic career, she worked as a photojournalist at the Philadelphia Daily News and as a photo editor at AOL News and ABC News.

Parameswaran  is Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor and Director of Journalism in The Media School at Indiana University. Her research areas are feminist cultural studies, gender and media globalization, South Asia, and postcolonial studies. She studies the complexity of gender as a multidimensional social category whose meaning evolves only in relation to other social formations of race, class, caste, race, and ethnicity. Her publications include a 2013 Wiley-Blackwell edited encyclopedic volume on global audience studies, two monograph articles in Journalism & Communication Monographs, 26 articles in leading journals (five reprinted as book chapters), and 13 book chapters. Her research has been published in a variety of academic journals, including  Journal of Children & Media, Communication, Culture, & Critique, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Qualitative Inquiry, Communication Review, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. She is a former editor of Communication, Culture, and Critique, a flagship journal of the International Communication Association. 

Partain is a PhD candidate in the Media School where her work focuses on Middle Eastern forced migrant communities in the Middle East and in diaspora. She interrogates politics of western representations of these communities, as well as forced migrant self-representation, by engaging with cycles of media production, consumption, and resistance while thinking about intersections of race, religion, and nationality. Presently, Partain’s research is centered on Syrian and Palestinian forced migrants in the US but her body of work also includes scholarship located in Iran and Lebanon. Partain earned her MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas-Austin in 2015 and her BA in Religious Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013.​

Pennington is an Assistant Professor of Journalism in the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University. Her work on media representations of marginalized communities particularly centers on Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim sentiment. On Islam: Muslims and the Media, a book that Pennington co-edited with Hilary Kahn from IU, builds upon her research on media representations to additionally highlight best practices for reporting on stories regarding Muslim communities. While pursuing her PhD in mass communication from IU, where she graduated in 2015, Pennington managed Voices and Visions at the Center for the Study of Global Change and served as a producer both for Crash Course in Islam and Muslim Voices podcasts, in addition to managing both podcasts’ social media accounts. Prior to academia, Pennington worked as a reporter/anchor/producer at the WOUB News in 2001, later serving as WOUB’s managing editor for two years, and worked at WBHM FM in Birmingham, AL for four years.

Sela is an Associate Professor of Central Eurasian and International Studies in the School of Global and International Studies, where he also serves as Director of the Islamic Studies Program. Focusing on the history and historiography of Islamic Central Asia in the 16^th-20^th centuries, with forays into South Asia, Russia and the Middle East, Sela’s work examines notions of authority and legitimacy within Islam as well as political and cultural self-representation in Islamic literary sources. Sela researches reification of boundaries both internal and external to group identity as exhibited through rhetoric, customs and rituals, and other political and cultural symbols. Having produced a large body of scholarship, some highlights from Sela’s work include The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia (2011) and a co-edited volume, Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources (2010).

Sellers is Director of the Game Design Program and a Professor of Practice at Indiana University, and is the author of “Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach,” published in 2017 by Pearson Education. He has spent more than twenty years working in the games industry and been a founder of three successful independent game companies. Mike has developed indie and AAA games, and has extensive experience in designing and producing MMO, social, and mobile games. Past titles include Meridian 59, The Sims 2, and Realm of the Mad God, as well as published research in advanced social artificial intelligence.

Shanahan is the Dean of the Media School at Indiana University. He is a mass media effects researcher. His research interests focus on cultural indicators, cultivation theory, media effects and public opinion. Shanahan’s special area of focus is communication in relation to science and the environment. He has co-authored and co-edited several books, including Living with Television Now (co-edited with Michael Morgan and Nancy Signorielli, 2012), Television and its Viewers (with Michael Morgan, 1999), Nature Stories (with Katherine McComas, 1999) and Democracy Tango (with Michael Morgan, 1995). He has published numerous articles and chapters on topics related to media effects.

Sullivan is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Affiliate Professor of Law at Indiana University Bloomington. Sullivan’s work explores the phenomenology of religion under the modern rule of law while considering religion more broadly as a complex social and cultural reality. Locating her work in the US context, Sullivan has written four books on intersections of religion and law—including The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (New Edition 2018) and A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (2014)—co-authored a book, and co-edited three additional volumes. Prior to completing her PhD degree at University of Chicago in 1993, Sullivan graduated with her JD from University of Chicago in 1976 and practiced law until returning to academia.