Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. A national authority on religion and the media, her expertise includes religion, politics and the news media as well as religion and the entertainment media. A journalist and a scholar, Winston’s current research interests are media coverage of Islam, religion and new media, and the place of religion in American identity.
Between 1983 and 1995, Winston covered religion at the Raleigh News and Observer, the Dallas Times Herald and the Baltimore Sun and contributed regularly to the Dallas Morning News. She has won numerous press association awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer for her work in Raleigh, Dallas and Baltimore. More recently Winston developed the Faith Front column at the Los Angeles Times and has written for the Huffington Post. Her articles also have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She currently writes about religion and media twice a week at http://uscmediareligion.org.
In 1996, Winston received a Ph.D. from PrincetonUniversity. Her work in American religion explored evangelicalism, gender, consumer culture and urbanization. Her subsequent books have been Red Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Harvard, 1999), Faith in the Market: Religion and Urban Commercial Culture (Rutgers, 2003) and Small Screen, Picture: Lived Religion and Television (Baylor, 2009). Her current project looks at religion, the news media and American identity.
Winston received post-doctoral grants from the Ford Foundation and the Lilly Endowment to work on religion, media and higher education projects and, subsequently, served as a program officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts. Her grant portfolio included both Religion and Higher Education and Religion and Media and she was responsible for the Pew Centers of Excellence as well as supporting Religionlink, Religionsource, The Revealer and “Speaking of Faith.” She was appointed the first Knight Chair at USC in 2003 and has been in Los Angeles since. She teaches in the School of Journalism (“Covering Religion in the 21st Century,” “Religion, Race and Culture”), the School of Communication (“Faith, Media and Hollywood”) and the School of Religion (“American Religious History, “American Religion and Foreign Policy”).