Biography
Pablo J. Boczkowski (he / él) is Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Latinx Digital Media, at Northwestern, and Co-Founder and Co- Director of the Center for the Study of Media and Society in Argentina, a joint initiative between Northwestern and Universidad de San Andrés, in Buenos Aires. He is Fellow of the International Communication Association, and was Chair of the Fellows for 2022-23. He was a psychotherapist in his hometown of Buenos Aires before moving to the United States in the mid-1990s to pursue graduate education in science and technology studies. After a quarter century devoted to studying the interactions between material culture, communication, and politics, he is returning to his roots with a book manuscript in-progress tentatively entitled “Digital Freud: Technology, Work and Inequality in Clinical Practice.”
Boczkowski is the author of seven books, five edited volumes, and more than sixty journal articles. His first book, “Digitizing the News” (MIT Press, 2004), is the only book in the history of the International Communication Association to receive both the Outstanding Book Award (in 2005), for the best book published in the previous two years, and the Fellows Book Award (in 2023) for making a “substantial contribution to the scholarship of the communication field as well as the broader rubric of the social sciences and have stood some test of time.” Recent awards include the 2022 Best Book Award from the Ethnography Division of the National Communication for “Abundance” (Oxford University Press, 2021) and its selection in 2023 as one of thirty Key Titles of Argentina by the Ministry of Foreign Relations to represent the country in international book fairs; the 2022 Public Sociology Award from the Communication, Information Technologies and Media Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association for “The Digital Environment” (MIT Press, 2021); and the 2022-23 Bob Franklin Journal Article Award, the 2023 Wolfgang Donsbach Outstanding Journal Article of the Year Award, and the 2022 Digital Journalism Outstanding Article of the Year Award, all for “Taking a Break from News” (Digital Journalism, 2022). He will spend academic year 2023-24 as a Member of the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He writes regularly for Infobae América, and Revista Anfibia. Last but not least, he is an unfailing —and often heartbroken—supporter of San Lorenzo de Almagro
