The Annenberg School Welcomes Five New Undergraduate Lecturers for Spring 2019

This semester, the Annenberg School welcomes five scholars who will be teaching courses in our undergraduate program for the first time: Lik Sam Chan, Rayya El Zein, Eytan Gilboa, Daniel Grinberg, and Lee McGuigan.

Eytan Gilboa is new to the Annenberg School, but has held academic positions in both Israel and the United States and is the founder of the School of Communication at Bar-Ilan University. He is an expert on international communication, public diplomacy, and United States’ policy in the Middle East, and he writes for newspapers and serves as a radio and television commentator. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Gilboa will teach COMM 390: Media and Diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli Conflict this semester. This course explores the roles of media and public opinion in contemporary international conflicts and will examine cases of warfare and negotiations in Arab-Israeli relations beginning with the Israeli-Egyptian peace process in the 1970s to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Lik Sam Chan is the 2018-2020 George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School. Chan’s research focuses on emerging dating app culture in the United States and China. He is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the implications of dating apps on feminist politics, gender performance, queer possibilities, and the nature of intimacy. He received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.

In the Spring 2019 semester, Chan will teach COMM 290: Interpersonal Communication. The course will examine friendships, romantic relationships, and family relationships in both online and offline settings and will draw cases studies from both the Global West and the Global East.

Rayya El Zein is in the second year of her postdoctoral fellowship with Annenberg’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. She studies live cultural production, popular culture and media, and audiences in urban Arab contexts and diasporas. Interested in the political economy of consumption and leisure, she is writing a book on the emergent politics in rap and hip hop concerts in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. She received her Ph.D. in Theater from the City University of New York.

This semester, El Zein will teach COMM 352: Politics & Popular Music. This course will consider intercultural and global approaches to music mediation, exploring political questions of audience formation, cultural representation, and the circulation of musical commodities in the context of global capitalism.

Daniel Grinberg is a postdoctoral fellow with Annenberg’s Center for Media at Risk. He studies government media and censorship and is interested in topics like terror watchlists, predictive security algorithms, and the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. He is currently working on his first book, which examines how documentary media and FOIA disclosures mediate public knowledge of covert security and surveillance practices. He received his Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Grinberg is teaching COMM 353: Conflict, Risk, and Digital Media during the Spring 2019 semester. COMM 353 will analyze contemporary practices of conflict, war, and security, and the digital media that participate in those practices. The course will interrogate the risks of producing media in the line of fire.

Last month, Lee McGuigan received his Ph.D. from the Annenberg School, where he successfully defended his dissertation entitled “Selling the American People: Data, Technology, and the Calculated Transformation of Advertising.” He studies the business and cultural histories of television and advertising, the sociology of markets and consumption, and the political economy of technology.

This semester, McGuigan is teaching COMM 130: Media Industries and Society. One of the introductory courses to the Communication major, COMM 130 aims to acquaint students with the work and language of media practitioners and covers a range of economic, political, legal, historical, and culture considerations.