Pawel Popiel

Pawel Popiel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Production at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.

His work focuses on the political economy and regulation of the media, examining the politics and blurring lines of competition, speech, and data policies in media and digital platform sectors. He leads the US team in the Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (https://gmicp.org/), an international research endeavor to map market concentration in the media industries across 36 countries. His research has been published in journals like Information, Communication & Society, Policy & Internet, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Journal of Digital Media & Policy, and in edited books. He also has contributed to several policy reports. His co-authored report for the media advocacy organization Internews, assessing challenges facing data protection regulators in the Global South, won the Future of Privacy Forum’s 2023 Privacy Papers for Policymakers award. He is also an Opportunity Fellow at the Benton Institute, investigating the effectiveness of low-income internet plans and the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, launched in 2021 to subsidize internet access for the poorest Americans, in closing the digital divide.

Previously, Popiel was the George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Media, Inequality, and Change (MIC) Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an Affiliate at The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

He obtained his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and holds a B.A. in Political Science from McGill University and an M.A. in Media Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.