Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud (Ph.D., Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 2006) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Assistant Director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation at the University of Texas at Austin. She is broadly interested in how the media affect our political behaviors and attitudes and how our political behaviors and attitudes affect our media use. Her recent book, Niche News: The Politics of News Choice (Oxford University Press, 2011) explores the causes, consequences, and prevalence of partisan selective exposure, the preference for likeminded political information.

While at CSDP during 2014-2015, Talia will be working on a book manuscript that builds on her earlier work studying preferences for likeminded political information, now asking when and how people have productive engagements with views unlike their own. The project has two parts. The first, descriptive component aims to better understand when and how people approach political perspectives with which they disagree. The second is more directly solutions ‐ oriented. Are there ways to proactively encourage people to charitably engage with others’ views? She has several data collection and analysis projects that inform her book project, including experimental data and comment section data from a news organization’s website.