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Emily Van Duyn

Profile picture for Emily Van Duyn

Contact Information

3001 Lincoln Hall
702 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL, 61801

Office Hours

Fall 2023: TH: 11 am - 1 pm
Assistant Professor

Biography

Emily Van Duyn is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to Illinois, Van Duyn earned her PhD in Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University with the Program on Democracy and the Internet. Her research explores why people talk (or do not talk) about politics and the role of digital media in facilitating a space for community and political discourse. She tackles these questions using diverse methodologies, including surveys, experiments, interviews, and ethnography. Her recent book with Oxford University Press, Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret, focuses on the reasons why individuals do not express their political opinions in public and how they express those opinions and organize in secret. Across two years, she follows a secret group of progressives in rural Texas who, out of fear of their conservative community, meet in secret to talk about politics and take political action. Her work is concerned with the effects of social, geographic, and political polarization and how these phenomena threaten liberal democratic norms. 

Research Interests

Political Communication
Public Opinion
Media Effects
Political Polarization

Education

Ph.D., Communication Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
M.Ed., Southern Methodist University
B.S., Communication Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
B.A., Government, The University of Texas at Austin

Additional Campus Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Communication

Recent Publications

Collier, J. R., & Van Duyn, E. (2023). Fake news by any other name: phrases for false content and effects on public perceptions of U.S. news media. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 51(4), 424-443. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2022.2148487

Stroud, N. J., & Van Duyn, E. (2023). Curbing the decline of local news by building relationships with the audience. Journal of Communication, Article jqad018. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad018

Van Duyn, E., & Muddiman, A. (2022). Predicting perceptions of incivility across 20 news comment sections. Journalism, 23(1), 134-152. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884920907779

Peacock, C., & Van Duyn, E. (Accepted/In press). Monitoring and correcting: why women read and men comment online. Information Communication and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.1993957

Van Duyn, E. (2021). Democracy Lives in Darkness: How and Why People Keep Their Politics a Secret. (Journalism and Political Communication Unbound). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197557013.001.0001

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