Stewart M. Hoover, Ph.D.
Stewart M. Hoover is Professor of Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he directs the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture and is a Professor Adjoint of Religious Studies and American Studies. He holds both the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. He has served two terms as Interim Dean of the School at Colorado. His research interests center on media audience and reception studies rooted in cultural studies, anthropology and qualitative sociology. Within this field, he has concentrated on studies of media and religion, looking first at the phenomenon of televangelism, and later at the professional, cultural and discursive construction of religion by the press. His most recent work involves household-level studies of media audience practices of meaning-making and identity. Supported by a series of grants from the Lilly Endowment, this work investigates the extent to which the media sphere as a whole and the various media which comprise it constitute a central site of meaning practice (including religious meaning practice) in contemporary life.
Hoover is author of The Electronic Giant (Brethren Press), Mass Media Religion: The Social Sources of the Electronic Church (Sage), Religion in the News: Faith and Journalism in American Public Discourse (Sage) and Religion in the Media Age (Routledge). He is co-author, along with members of his research team, of Media, Home and Family (Routledge). He has co-edited three collections, Religious Television: Controversies and Conclusions (Ablex; with Robert Abelman), Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture (Sage; with Knut Lundby), and Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press; with Lynn Schofield Clark). He has published numerous articles in academic and popular publications, and has consulted and lectured extensively both in the United States and abroad. He is one of three series editors (with Jolyon Mitchell and David Morgan) of the Media and Religion book series published by Routledge in London. He is a co-director of the Porticus International Seminars in Media, Religion, and Culture. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the journal Media and Religion. He was founding co-chair of the Religion, Culture, and Communication Program Unit at the American Academy of Religion. He was founding chair of the International Study Commission on Media, Religion and Culture, is a member of the Steering Committee of the Uppsala Group, and co-directed the first international public conference on Media, Religion and Culture, held at Boulder in 1996, and chairs the steering group of that ongoing conference series. He and his wife, Karen, have traveled extensively abroad and have lived for extended periods in the United Kingdom (England and Scotland), Sweden, and Sri Lanka. In addition to his work on media and religion, he conducted research on media and culture in the Eastern Caribbean between 1981 and 1990.