Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Visiting Lecture

The 2020 Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Visiting Lecture will be delivered by Siva Vaidhyanathan, the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, on Wednesday, April 29, at 8 p.m.

Register for the 2020 Jones Visiting Lecture

His talk, “Cacophony: Information, Misinformation, and the Fracturing of Attention,” will take an interactive format which following brief remarks will include President Alison Byerly moderating an interview and discussion with Prof. Vaidhyanathan among faculty members Ben Cohen (engineering studies) and Katherine Groo (film and media studies); Amanda Pisetzner '10, who works for VICE News Tonight; and Hamna Younas '22. Following the discussion, there will be time for Q&A from attendees.  

Vaidhyanathan is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction, and The Googlization of Everything–and Why We Should Worry, among others.

Vaidhyanathan is a columnist for The Guardian and has written for many other periodicals, including The New York Times, Bloomberg View, American Scholar, Reason, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Slate.com, BookForum, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. He is a frequent contributor to public radio programs, and he has appeared on news programs on BBC, CNN, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, ABC, and on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In 2015 he was portrayed on stage at the Public Theater in a play called Privacy. After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin.