16.10.2025
UNC – Chapel Hill Scholars at the Institut für Medienwissenschaft
Dr. Daniel Johnson (left) is a PhD graduate of the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Daniel was a U.S. Army journalist and public relations specialist during the war against ISIL and now he researches and writes on mental health struggles amongst service members to influence policy. His coverage of blast overpressure injuries and the impact on the brain from close proximity to high-powered guns led to a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2024 and legislative action.
At Tübingen, Dr. Johnson plans to conduct research and teach courses on media advocacy—the strategic use of media to drive social and political change. He is developing a theoretical model that explores how media can influence perceptions of institutional efficacy, specifically the belief in institutions' ability to address societal issues and support desired behaviors. His research focuses on how various forms of media—such as data-driven journalism, documentaries, films, and social media influencers—shape these perceptions and potentially prompt responses from policymakers.
Dr. Johnson is eager to connect with scholars researching journalism and science/health communication strategies, and media agenda setting and framing. He can share his experiences as a media writer of opinion columns, data driven journalism, narrative journalism, and more.
You can reach Dr. Johnson at daniel-isaiah.johnson@philosophie.uni-tuebingen.de
Dr. Victoria "Tori" Smith Ekstrand (middle) is a professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and has been a media law and free expression scholar for more than two decades. She recently completed a three-year term at the UNC Graduate School as the Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education, where she directed UNC’s premier doctoral fellowship program. Before joining the academy, Dr. Ekstrand worked as a senior executive for The Associated Press at its headquarters in New York City, where her last position was as Director of Corporate Communications.
Dr. Ekstrand will spend the fall in Tübingen as a 2025-26 Fulbright-Schuman scholar, which supports research of US-EU relations. Her research project addresses change needed in standardized media law curriculum in US higher education due to artificial intelligence, democratic backsliding, and the widening gap between US and EU media regulation.
Dr. Ekstrand is eager to engage with local experts and industry about her Fulbright project. She is also available to speak with classes about First Amendment, free press and free expression problems in the US, as well as her academic freedom advocacy work with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) during a time of attacks on US higher education.
You can reach Dr. Ekstrand at: torismit@email.unc.edu.
Dr. Anna Beers (right) is a visiting researcher at the University of Tübingen via a scholarship from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation (2025-2027). She is coming from a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP), and completed her PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.
Her research concerns the nexus between far-right politics and influencer media in the United States, and she specializes in methodologies from network science. She is particularly interested in far-right pseudoscientific disinformation, and disinformation campaigns targeting transgender people. She typically takes a methodological approach to researching social media, attempting to find new ways of gathering and representing online data pertaining to political communication.
She wants to use her two years at the University of Tübingen to forge connections with German researchers, and better understand far-right media movements in comparative context between the U.S. and Europe. She is excited to connect with local researchers for discussions and potential collaborations.
You can reach Dr. Beers at: anna.beers@philosophie.uni-tuebingen.de
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