Jeff Pooley, Ph.D.

Jeff Pooley writes and teaches on social media, scholarly communication, media theory, and the history of communication research.

Jeff Pooley is a Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication and is Affiliated Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College. He also directs mediastudies.press, a nonprofit open access publisher in communication and media studies. His teaching and research interests center on the history of communication research, social media and identity, and scholarly communication.

Pooley was born and raised in Palo Alto, CA. He graduated from Harvard College, where he majored in social studies. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Columbia University, after a brief career as a journalist. He taught at Muhlenberg, in Allentown, PA, for 20 years, and was a visiting Annenberg Scholar in 2009. Since 2013, Pooley has served as a Subject Consultant for the Annenberg School for Communication Library Archives (ASCLA) and its History of the Field collection. Pooley co-edits a pair of journals, History of Media Studies and History of Social Science, and serves as a Fellow at Knowledge Futures, a scholarly infrastructure nonprofit. He is co-founder and co-lead of MediArXiv, the open archive for media and communication studies.

Pooley is author of James W. Carey and Communication Research: Reputation at the University’s Margins (Peter Lang, 2016), and co-editor of Society on the Edge: Social Science and Public Policy in the Postwar United States (Cambridge, 2021), The History of Media and Communication Research (Peter Lang, 2008) and Media and Social Justice (Palgrave, 2011).