Africa Table - The Social Is Political: Media, Protest And Change In Africa

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Speaker: Herman Wasserman, Professor of Media Studies & Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Herman Wasserman is Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He holds a doctorate from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and worked as a journalist before starting an academic career. He has held positions at the universities of Stellenbosch, Sheffield, Newcastle and Rhodes. He has published widely on media in post-apartheid South Africa, including more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals and more than 35 book chapters.

His books include the monograph Tabloid Journalism in South Africa (Indiana University Press, 2010) and the edited collections Chinese Media and Soft Power in Africa: Promotion and Perceptions (with Xiaoling Zhang and Winston Mano, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Media Ethics and Justice in a Global Age (with Shakuntala Rao, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Reporting China in Africa (Routledge, 2014), Press Freedom in Africa: Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2013), Popular Media, Democracy and Development in Africa (Routledge, 2011), Media Ethics Beyond Borders (with Stephen J. Ward, Routledge, 2010).

He has held a Fulbright research fellowship at Indiana University in the US, has been a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and an invited speaker at conferences at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,  Helsinki, Moscow State University, Yale University, the Institute for Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Finnish Institute of International Affairs in Helsinki, the Forum for Media Development in Berlin, the Rwanda Media Commission and UNESCO in Nairobi.Wasserman is Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal African Journalism Studies published by Taylor and Francis, and sits on the editorial boards of eleven other international journals, including the Annals of the International Communication Association, of which he is an Associate Editor. His new book, Media, Geopolitics, and Power: A View from the Global South is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.