Lori Beckstead is an Associate Professor in the RTA School of Media and Director of the Allan Slaight Radio Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University where she teaches courses in podcasting, radio and sound studies. She is the on-again, off-again co-producer and co-host of The Podcast Studies Podcast along with Dario Llinares.
Kim Fox
Kim Fox is a professor of practice at The American University in Cairo (AUC) in Egypt. Her primary area of interest is radio/audio/podcasting. She uniquely produces, teaches and conducts academic research on podcasts.
As a scholar-creative she’s the founder and organizer of PodFest Cairo, Egypt and Africa’s first podcasting conference; an annual event based in Cairo as well as the executive producer of the award-winning Ehky Ya Masr (Tell Your Story Egypt) Podcast. It’s a narrative nonfiction bilingual podcast about life in Egypt. In 2022, the podcast made history at the Broadcast Education Association’s (BEA) Festival of Media Arts by being the first to win two Best of Festival (BoF) awards in the same year. The BoF is BEA’s highest creative recognition.
With a focus on feminist pedagogy, oral history methodology and project-based learning (PBL), she has coached her students to win a long list of international audio awards and recognitions. Along with her teaching and creative scholarship, her scholarly research includes a focus on Black and African podcasters including the following:
In terms of service, she is the president of BEA and the co-president for the Association for Independents in Radio (AIR).
Her podcast listen list consists of lots of daily news pods like The 7 from The Washington Post and chatcasts like FANTI and Vibe Check, but she’s also a sucker for narrative nonfiction storytelling like Ear Hustle and Making.
You won’t find her ranting on Twitter, but check her out there … just in case.
Nicholas John
Prof. Nicholas John is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the Vice President (and President-Elect) of the Association of Internet Researchers. In addition to podcasting, his research interests technology and society, the internet, social media, sharing, and unfriending. He is the author of the award-winning book, The Age of Sharing. Nik’s research has been published, among others, in the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Nik is a low-brow podcast listener who takes much enjoyment from the football podcast, The Arsecast, and the comedy podcasts, The Beef and Dairy Network Podcast and Three Bean Salad.
Tzlil Sharon
Tzlil Sharon is a PhD student (ABD) at the Department of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, supervised by Prof. Nicholas John and Prof. Amit Pinchevski. Her doctoral dissertation, part of an Israel Science Foundation project about the cultural logic of podcast listening, explores the technical and cultural preconditions that arguably construct a new kind of listenership. Drawing on formative studies of the communicative structures of media, her study examines how podcasts speak to us and how they construct their listening subjects. Tzlil's work on podcasting has been featured in Popular Communication and Annals of the International Communication Association. She has also published articles in New Media & Society and Communication Theory, reflecting her broader interests in media theory. Previously, Tzlil served as a producer for the academic podcast, The SIP. Some of her favorite podcasts include The Heart (season: bodies), Everything is Alive, How to Be a Girl, and Homecoming.
John L. Sullivan
John L. Sullivan is Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. His research explores the links between media industries and systems of social and economic power. He recently completed a long-term study of podcasting production in the United States, focusing on the processes of formalization and monetization of amateur and semi-professional (or “Pro-Am”) labor, which will be released in a forthcoming book entitled Podcasting in a Platform Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). He is the author ofMedia Audiences (2nd edition, Sage 2019), an undergraduate text which explores the theoretical landscape of audience studies in media and communication, as well as “The Platforms of Podcasting: Past and Present” (Social Media + Society, 2019). In addition to his work on podcasting, he has published research on a wide variety of other topics, including the U.S. distribution of British science fiction series Doctor Who, the development of social movements around free, open source (F/OSS) software, and issues of artificial scarcity in digital software. John typically listens to podcasts about podcasting, such as Podnews and the New Media Show, but he also listens to The Podcast Studies Podcast!
