Sarah Banet-Weiser is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and a professor of communication at USC Annenberg. She is the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (CCAS). Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship, and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism. Committed to exploring how global media politics are exercised, expressed, and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2019-2020, she had a regular column on popular feminism in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her latest book, co-authored with Kathryn Higgins, is titled Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023).

Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, as is her scholarly editorial work. She was formerly the editor of the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, as well as co-editor of the International Communication Association journal, Communication, Culture, Critique, and was the founding co-editor of the New York University Press book series, Critical Cultural Communication Studies. Banet-Weiser has been the recipient of international fellowships and visiting professorships at, among others, the Foundation Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris, France; the Gulbenkian Foundation and the University of Portugal in Lisbon, Portugal; Microsoft Research New England (the social media collective); and McGill University in Montreal (Media@McGill Scholar). She is a fellow of the International Communication Association.

Banet-Weiser is a distinguished faculty fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching at USC. She was formerly a professor and head of department at the London School of Economics after 19 years as a professor, vice dean, and director of the USC Annenberg School of Communication. 

Sarah Banet-Weiser is currently not accepting any new PhD advisees from USC Annenberg.

Awards and honors: 

ICA Outstanding Book Award, Authentic™ 
Constance Rourke Prize for Best Article in American Quarterly
Mellon Graduate Student Mentoring Award