Victor Pickard (professor)
Victor Pickard is an American media studies scholar. He is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He works on the intersections of U.S. and global media activism and politics; the history and political economy of media institutions; and the normative foundations of media policy. Background and education Pickard was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, and attended Quaker Valley High School and then Allegheny College. He earned a master's degree in communications from the University of Washington and, in 2008, a Ph.D. at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, with a thesis "Media Democracy Deferred: The Postwar Settlement for U.S. Communications, 1945-1949." Academic career and policy work Before teaching at Penn, Pickard was an assistant professor in the Media, Culture, and Communication Department at New York University. Pickard also designed and taught the inaugural Verklin media policy course at the University of Virginia. In D.C., he worked on media policy as a senior research fellow at the media reform organization Free Press and the public policy think tank the New America Foundation. He was the first full-time researcher at New America's Open Technology Institute, where he continues