Marwan M. Kraidy

About

Marwan M. Kraidy is dean and CEO of Northwestern in Qatar, where he oversees all academic, administrative, and operational units. These include academic programs in communication, journalism, and the liberal arts, a museum, a library, digital production studios, and an ultra-modern newsroom, in a state of the art 515,000 square-foot campus in Education City, Doha. Dean Kraidy is also a professor of communication and the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture at Northwestern.

In 2021, Kraidy founded the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South, which hosts multidisciplinary teams of faculty and students dedicated to evidence-based storytelling on the diverse histories, cultures, societies, and media of the Global South. The Institute will host fellows, mentor emerging scholars, and produce multi-lingual and multi-modal outputs.

A scholar of global communication and an authority on Arab media, culture, and politics, Kraidy is a leading figure in global media studies. His interdisciplinary expertise spans culture and geopolitics, theories of identity and modernity, humanistic inquiry, comparative media systems, images and effects, media industries, and digital sovereignty.

Fluent in Arabic, English, and French and conversant in Spanish, Kraidy has authored 13 award-winning books and more than 130 articles, essays, and chapters. The winner of more than 50 awards for teaching and scholarship, Dean Kraidy has advised foundations, civic organizations, museums, and governments, and has delivered keynote addresses, named lectures, and media commentary in multiple languages worldwide.

Dean Kraidy’s latest project is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow endowed book on war machines in the digital age, focusing on the projectilic imagery of extremist movements. Other projects focus on the geopolitics of Turkish television drama, the aesthetics and politics of music video, political graffiti in the digital age, and the rise of a digital-native Arab news sphere. Through these projects, he continues to develop an abiding interest in South-to-South relations and “Theory from the South.”

Dean Kraidy’s account of the Arab Spring, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard, 2016) is an innovative reappraisal of the body politic in the digital age. It considers activism through the human body as a physical, symbolic, and aesthetic locus of power and rebellion, and features an engrossing cast of characters who confronted scorned dictators in street activism and a vibrant digital culture. He crafted the book in Wassenaar, as a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences and Humanities (NIAS) and of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS); and revised it in Philadelphia as a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The book won the International Communication Association’s Outstanding Book Award, the ICA’s Division of Global Communication and Social Change Best Book Award, the Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award in Political Communication, National Communication Association, and was a 2016 Times Higher Education Book of the Year.

In 2011, Kraidy was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his work in media and cultural studies.

In 2016, Kraidy was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for his work on war machines in the age of global communication. He was the first communication scholar to win this prestigious award.

In 2017, Kraidy became the only scholar to have twice won the Best Book Award from the International Communication Association’s Division of Global Communication and Social Change, first in 2011 for Reality Television and Arab Politics, and again in 2017 for The Naked Blogger of Cairo.

Also in 2017, Kraidy became the first author to win the Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award in Political Communication two times, in 2011 and 2017, for the same two books.

A dedicated teacher, Dean Kraidy has taught courses on theory and method; globalization; comparative media systems; culture and revolution; humanistic inquiry; the body in digital culture; music video and reality television; transnational public spheres, and the geopolitics of popular culture.

Prior to assuming his position at Northwestern, Kraidy served as associate dean for administration and professor of global communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of School for Communication. He was also the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture, and founding director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, dedicated to the advanced study of the diversity of global media and cultures under the rubric of “globalization from below.”

Kraidy has been the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut, the Albert Bonnier Jr. Professor of Media Studies at Stockholm University, the Chaire Dupront at Sorbonne-Universités in Paris, the Dr. Elizabeth Chopin Endowed Professor at Webster University-Vienna, and visiting professor at universities in China, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the USA.

Dean Kraidy earned his bachelor’s degree in communication arts from Notre-Dame University in Louaizé, Lebanon, and his Lebanese baccalaureate in humanities at Saint Joseph College in Antoura, Lebanon. He holds a Ph.D. in mass communication from Ohio University, where he also earned his master’s degree in telecommunications.

He tweets @MKraidy.

Publications

2017 IS THERE A GLOBAL DIGITAL CULTURE? Special Section of International Journal of Communication, with CARGC Press.

2017 THE ARAB REVOLUTIONARY PUBLIC SPHERE [First editor with Marina Krikorian], Special Issue of Communication and the Public, 2(2), with CARGC Press.

2016 GLOBAL MEDIA STUDIES [co-author Toby Miller] Cambridge, UK.

2016 AMERICAN STUDIES ENCOUNTERS THE MIDDLE EAST [co-editor Alex Lubin]. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press; 328 pp.

2016 THE NAKED BLOGGER OF CAIRO: CREATIVE INSURGENCY IN THE ARAB WORLD [singleauthor], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 304

2013 THE TURKISH TOUCH: EGEMONIA NEO-OTTOMANA E TELEVISONE TURCA IN MEDIO ORIENTE, Carney, J. Kraidy, M. M., Nocera, L and S. M Torelli. Rome, Italy: Le monografie di Arab Media Report, N. 1, 51 pp. [Creative Commons License]

2012 COMMUNICATION AND POWER IN THE GLOBAL ERA: ORDERS AND BORDERS, [editor]. London & New York: Routledge.

2010 THE POLITICS OF REALITY TELEVISION: GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES [first co-editor with Katherine Sender, London and New York: Routledge.

2010 REALITY TELEVISION AND ARAB POLITICS: CONTENTION IN PUBLIC LIFE [single-author], Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press; 272.

2009 ARAB TELEVISION INDUSTRIES [first author with Joe Khalil], British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan; 197 pp.

2005 HYBRIDITY OR, THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF GLOBALIZATION [single-author]. Philadelphia: Temple University Press; 240 pp.

2003 GLOBAL MEDIA STUDIES: ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES [second co-editor with Patrick D. Murphy]. London & New York: Routledge.

Fellowships

2016-2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, The Carnegie Corporation, New York, NY, USA

2015-2016 National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC, USA 

2014-2015 American Council of Learned Societies, New York, NY, USA

2014-2015 Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar, The Netherlands

2011-2013 Penn Fellow, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA 

2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY, USA

2005-2006 Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, USA

1996-1997 Alice T. Clark Fellow, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, USA

Awards

In 2011, Kraidy was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his work in media and cultural studies.

In 2016, Kraidy was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for his work on war machines in the age of global communication.

In 2017, Kraidy became the only scholar to have twice won the Best Book Award from the International Communication Association’s Division of Global Communication and Social Change, first in 2011 for Reality Television and Arab Politics, and again in 2017 for The Naked Blogger of Cairo.

Also in 2017, Kraidy became the first author to win the Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award in Political Communication two times, in 2011 and 2017, for the same two books.