About

VP


After living abroad for five years teaching and traveling, Victor Pickard returned to the U.S. to resume his academic studies. He holds an MA in communications from the University of Washington where he conducted research for the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, and wrote his Master's thesis on and volunteered for the Seattle Independent Media Center.

Victor's current doctoral research in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign explores the intersections of media politics, history, democratic theory, and communications policy. He has delivered over 70 conference presentations, invited lectures and media interviews, and published over a dozen journal articles and book chapters on subjects such as Internet policy, the media democracy movement, mainstream news narratives, and media history. His work has won a number of awards and has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the Journal of Communication; Global Media and Communication; Media, Culture & Society; New Media and Society; Journal of Communication Inquiry; International Journal of Communication Law and Policy; and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Victor spent the summer of 2005 working on media policy in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Telecommunications Policy Fellow for Congresswoman Diane Watson, and he continues to participate in crucial media policy debates. He will spend the summer of 2008 working on Internet policy as a Google Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation. In addition to working as a research fellow for the media reform organization Free Press, Victor is in the final stages of completing his PhD. His dissertation, Media Democracy Deferred: The Postwar Settlement for U.S. Communications 1945 - 1948, explores the origins of the social contract between U.S. media institutions, the government, and the public that emerged from 1940s media policy debates and initiatives such as the Hutchins Commission, the FCC Blue Book, and the Fairness Doctrine.