James Lull (born December 23, 1944) is an American social scientist and author known for ethnographic research on the interaction between communications technology and culture. [1] In addition to his academic career, Lull worked for many years as a media professional. His most recent scholarly work focuses on the decisive role of communication in human evolution.
Lull was born in Owatonna, Minnesota. He began working at age fifteen as a radio announcer in his home town. He joined the US Army after graduating from high school and trained to become an information and broadcast specialist at the Armed Forces Information School, Fort Slocum, New York, in 1963.
Lull was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, for nearly two years. During off duty hours he worked as an announcer for WCLS, WDAK, and WRBL radio in Columbus, Georgia. He was sent to Vietnam in 1965 as a combat journalist with the Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division. In 1966 Lull transferred to Armed Forces Radio Vietnam in Saigon where he became a staff announcer during the “Good Morning, Vietnam” era.
After being honorably discharged from the military Lull took degrees in History from El Camino College (Torrance, CA) and Radio-TV-Film from San Jose State University, California. As an undergraduate student he also worked full-time as staff announcer and later program director of KSJO-FM, San Jose. Lull received an MS degree with Honors in Telecommunication and Film from the University of Oregon. His graduate work continued at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the tutelage of the rhetorical scholar, Edwin Black. An article based on Lull’s doctoral dissertation, “Mass Media and Family Communication: An Ethnography of Audience Behavior,” won the Golden Monograph Award from the National Communication Association.
In 1976 Lull became Assistant Professor of Speech at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he taught for seven years. During that time he began a program of ethnographic research in China that led to the publication of China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance. Lull maintained a second career in media at KTYD-FM, Santa Barbara, where he was employed as program director and staff announcer until 1983. He returned to his undergraduate alma mater, San Jose State University, to direct the Radio-TV-Film Program in 1982, and later transferred into the university’s Communication Studies Department, where in 2015 he is Emeritus Professor. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of San Francisco, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Semester at Sea Program.
Lull has been awarded two Fulbright Senior Scholar grants (Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; University of Colima, Mexico) and a Leverhulme Trust grant (Goldsmiths College, University of London). He holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega University, Peru. Lull has taught courses at universities in the People's Republic of China, Brazil, Venezuela, Finland, Denmark, England, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Sweden.
A fluent Spanish speaker, Professor Lull has spent much of his academic career working in Mexico and South America.
Lull’s first book, Popular Music and Communication (1987), [2] [3] helped establish popular music as a form of human communication within the academic field of communication studies. A revised second edition of the edited volume was published in 1992. His second book, World Families Watch Television (1988), is a collection of ethnographic studies that discuss how television influences the family, and how families use television within diverse cultural contexts.
His third book, Inside Family Viewing: Ethnographic Research on Television’s Audiences (1990), [4] presents a collection of Lull’s essays on qualitative media audience research. The volume includes the article, “The Social Uses of Television,” which addresses how people actively engage television as a personal, social, and cultural resource. [3] One year later, he published China Turned On:Television, Reform, and Resistance an audience-based empirical analysis of the role of television in China’s modernization. [5]
Lull’s next project was Media, Communication, Culture: A Global Approach (1995) which explored how ideology, hegemony, and consciousness interact with human agency in everyday life across a range of global cultures. [6] An expanded and revised second edition of that volume was published in 2000 where theoretical concepts including zones of indeterminacy, cultural programming, and superculture were introduced. A co-edited volume, Media Scandals: Morality and Desire in the Popular Culture Marketplace, was published in 1997. Another edited book, Culture in the Communication Age, followed in 2001.
Three editions of James Lull’s multimedia book for college courses, Public Speaking: The Evolving Art, have been published since 2007.
Professor Lull’s theoretical work became directly focused on the role of communication in shaping human evolution with publication of Culture-on-Demand: Communication in a Crisis World in 2007. In that volume, Lull also discusses cultural contradictions in global communication and depicts religious ideology and fundamentalism as barriers to global communication. [7] [8] A 2012 publication, co-authored with the Brazilian-American semiotician Eduardo Neiva, is The Language of Life: How Communication Drives Human Evolution. The authors analyze survival, sex, culture, morality, religion, and technological change as communications activity, challenging traditional approaches to communication theory.
James Lull’s work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
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Molefi Kete Asante is an African-American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.
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John Hartley AM, FAHA, FRSA, ICA Fellow, is an academic who is Professor of Cultural Science and the previous Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University in Western Australia, and Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He has published over twenty books about communication, journalism, media and cultural studies, many of which have been translated into other languages.
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Toby Miller is a British/Australian-American interdisciplinary social scientist with areas of concentration including cultural studies and media studies. He is also the author of several books, numerous articles, and is a guest commentator on television and radio programs across the globe. He was chair of the Department of Media & Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and is most recently a professor at Loughborough University. Prior to his academic career, Miller worked in broadcasting, banking, and civil service.
Todd Joseph Miles Holden is an American-born social scientist, essayist, philosopher, and novelist. He was the first tenured foreign professor at Tohoku University, one of Asia’s elite universities, where he taught for 26 years. His scholarship has been multi- and trans-disciplinary, embracing globalization, media studies, cultural studies, semiotics, advertising, television, Japanese popular culture, sociology, cultural anthropology, political communication, gender, identity, and digital youth. Between 2000 and 2009 he was a contributor to the international webzine PopMatters, writing a regular column on Japanese popular culture called ReDotPop, and creating PM’s first blog, Peripatetic Postcards. In 2011 he published a book by the same name, bearing the subtitle "the journey of life through 25 of the world's cities". Recent work has included literary treatments of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, dystopia, philosophical detection, comedy and caper.
Andrea Lee Press is an American-born sociologist and media studies scholar. She is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Media Studies and Sociology at the University of Virginia.
José-Carlos Lozano-Rendón is a researcher in the area of Latin American media studies and in the social history of cinema who has done extensive empirical research on international and political communication based on critical theoretical approaches such as political economy and cultural studies. He is the author of one of the most popular and influential textbooks in Latin American communication schools: "Mass communication theories and research", published by Pearson since 1996. Having born and grown up in the Texas-Mexican border has also motivated him to work on issues related to media, culture and identity in this region. Lozano-Rendón is a professor and researcher at Texas A&M International University, in Laredo, Texas since 2012, and Research Fellow at the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo León, Mexico since 2020. He was Professor of Communication from 1992 to 2012 and Research Fellow from 2012 to 2020 at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Monterrey. Since 1993 he has been a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) in Mexico, being appointed National Researcher Level 3 for the period 2018 to 2028. He was admitted as a regular member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 2007. He has a Ph.D. in International Communication from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master's in Mass Communication from the University of Leicester, and a BA in Social Communication from the Universidad Regiomontana.
Hamid Naficy is a scholar of cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media, and of Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas. He is currently the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University in the department of Radio/Film/Television, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History, and a core member a core member of the Middle East and North African Studies Program. He has written on theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinemas and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas, publishing nearly a dozen books and scores of book chapters and journal articles. In addition, he has lectured nationally and internationally and his works have been cited and reprinted extensively and translated into many languages. His areas of research and teaching include these topics as well as documentary and ethnographic cinemas.
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Eliseo Roberto Colón Zayas is a Puerto Rican communication, semiotician, cultural theorist and mass media researcher who specializes in Latin American Mass Media Studies, Semiotics, Cultural Studies, Mass Media Culture, Discourse Analysis, Aesthetics and Advertising Discourse and has written extensively on melodrama and mass media narratives in Latin America, virtual interface mediated narratives, neoliberalism and mass media narratives, advertising discourse and on Puerto Rican mass media topics. He is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico's School of Communication, which he chaired from 1999 through 2013.
Luc Maria Alfons Pauwels is a Belgian visual sociologist and communication scientist, Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and director of its Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi). He is known for his work on visual research methods.
Dr. Robert Martin Shuter is an American author, academic, and consultant specializing in intercultural communication. He is Research Professor at the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University and Professor Emeritus at the Diedrich College of Communication at Marquette University, where he taught for 41 years and chaired the Department of Communication Studies for 29 years.
John Sinclair [born 1944] is a sociologist of international media, communication and culture. Based in Melbourne, Australia, he is acknowledged internationally for his published work on the global television and advertising industries, particularly as they have developed in Latin America and Asia. He also writes on the media use of peoples in diasporic and transnational contexts, and on related processes of consumption and the commercialisation of cultures.
Ignacio Aguaded, is a professor at the University of Huelva, a specialist in Educational Technology and Media education and the Editor-in-chief of an academic journal called Comunicar. Aguaded is also a member on the scientific councils of other journals and scientific committees including the Congreso Iberoamericano de Comunicación y Educación, Congreso Hispanoluso, Hacia una televisión de calidad and RTVE forum. Aguaded has published more than 80 books and book chapters in editorials such as Ediciones Egregius, Ediciones Paidós, Grupo Comunicar, Editorial K.R., Ediciones Aljibe, Alianza Editorial, Editorial Síntesis and Netbiblo.
