iSchool faculty, staff, and students will participate in the Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC 2025), which will be held from September 18–20 in Washington, DC.

President Donald Trump has threatened to levy higher tariffs on more than two dozen countries and on various products in the past few months. China in particular has been a target of the administration’s trade wars, aimed at preventing its dominance in areas such as artificial intelligence, although the U.S. government announced recently that it would sell advanced semiconductors used in AI to China. Assistant Professor Meicen Sun spoke with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel about the effects of trade restrictions.

Doctoral candidate Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou successfully defended his dissertation, "A Pragmatic and Human-centered Approach to Promoting Software Accessibility: Design, Education, Governance," on April 3.

Assistant Professor Melissa Ocepek and Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo have co-edited a new book, Governing Misinformation in Everyday Knowledge Commons, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press. An open access edition of the book is available, thanks to support from the Governing Knowledge Commons Research Coordination Network (NSF 2017495). The new book explores the socio-technical realities of misinformation in a variety of online and offline everyday environments. 

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Colin Rhinesmith joined the faculty as a visiting associate professor on January 1, 2025. His position will become permanent following approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. He previously served as founder and director of the Digital Equity Research Center at the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Little did doctoral candidate Kainen Bell know in 2013 when he was an undergraduate studying abroad in Brazil that the country would play a major role in his future dissertation research. Since his first trip, he has returned to Brazil multiple times, even completing a Fulbright study and working for a community-based organization in the country. Now, Bell is preparing to return again, this time to spend ten months conducting research as a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship.

Assistant Professor Meicen Sun was selected as a 2024 Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) Emerging Scholar and presented her research at the PTC Annual Conference, which was held from January 21-24 in Honolulu, Hawaii. PTC is a global, nonprofit organization promoting the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the Pacific Rim. 

Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has co-edited a new book, Governing Smart Cities as Knowledge Commons, with Brett M. Frischmann (Villanova University School of Law) and Michael J. Madison (University of Pittsburgh School of Law). The book examines how several cities handle ethical, economic, political, and social issues arising from the cities' technologically advanced statuses.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Meicen Sun will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2023, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Sun is a PhD candidate in political science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a research affiliate with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. For the 2022-2023 academic year, she will be a postdoctoral scholar with the Program on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University.

A new book on information policy includes chapters by Professor Emeritus Alistair Black and Associate Professor and Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Emily Knox. Research Handbook on Information Policy, edited by Alistair S. Duff, was recently published by Edward Elgar Publishing. The handbook covers topics such as the history and future of information policy, freedom of information and expression, intellectual property, and information inequality.

Assistant Professor Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo has co-edited a new book, Governing Privacy in Knowledge Commons, with Brett M. Frischmann (Villanova University School of Law) and Katherine J. Strandburg (New York University School of Law). The book, which was recently published by Cambridge University Press, explores the complex and dynamic relationships between privacy, governance, and the production, cultivation, and sharing of knowledge.

The iSchool is pleased to announce that Madelyn Sanfilippo will join the faculty as an assistant professor in August 2020. She is currently a postdoctoral IT policy researcher at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University.

At the end of October, Professor Emeritus Dan Schiller delivered a series of lectures in China focusing on the theme, "Networks and Age of Nixon." Schiller was invited to talk as part of Peking University's Global Fellowship Program. Prior lecturers in the Global Fellowship Program include Fredric Jameson and Francis Fukuyama and, going back to its earliest years, John Dewey.

Doctoral candidate Melissa Villa-Nicholas successfully defended her dissertation, "Latinas in Telecommunications: Intersectional Experiences in the Bell System," on June 30.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox has been elected to the Board of Trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF). Her one-year term will begin at the annual meeting of the board during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in June.

Assistant Professor Emily Knox will participate in a panel discussion on “Libraries and Public Access to Books” at the Tucson Festival of Books on Saturday, March 12. Knox and fellow experts will explore the topic of information access and the ways libraries have shaped conversations surrounding issues of access.

Assistant Professor Jana Diesner will speak at two upcoming conferences on the topic of collection and use of digital social trace data. Her talks will address current issues in this research field, including privacy, ethics and regulations, and methodological issues related to data accuracy as well as considering the content of text data for advancing social network theory.

As a GSLIS student, Kirsten Y. Howley focused on government and business information. Now she puts those skills to work daily in a role that facilitates information sharing and more at a large technology company. Where do you work and what is your role? I am a senior business analyst with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a technology integrator in technical,…

The group HP Kids Read is the 2015 recipient of the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award, given annually by the faculty of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cosponsored by Libraries Unlimited.

Research Associate Professor Jon Gant will lead a series of webinars this fall designed for local government officials across the state of Illinois. Webinars will focus on e-government topics, such as best practices (September 17), technology planning (October 15), and using data and analytics (November 19).