Rate My Professor Meredith Pruden

Dr. Meredith L. Pruden is an Assistant Professor of Media & Entertainment in the School of Communication and Media at Kennesaw State University, where she has served since 2022. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2021 to 2022 and a Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant as well as Presidential Fellow in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University from 2017 to 2021. Pruden holds a Ph.D. in Communication with a concentration in Media and Society from Georgia State University (2021), accompanied by a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; an M.A. in Communication with a concentration in Mass Communication from Georgia State University; and a B.S. in Communication with a concentration in Media Studies and a minor in Professional Writing from Kennesaw State University.

Her research focuses on the intersection of feminist media studies and political communication, investigating harmful online content, research-related trauma from studying risky topics, far-right media and politics, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy thinking through an intersectional sociotechnical lens. Pruden is a Fellow at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, a member of the Media & Democracy Data Cooperative and the Coalition for Independent Tech Research, and an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life. She has received the 2024 Outstanding Early Career Faculty Award and Outstanding Scholarship and Creative Activity Award from Kennesaw State University’s School of Communication & Media, the 2023 Top Contributor Research Award, the 2022 Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association, and the 2021 Top Overall Paper Award in the Peace and Conflict Division from the National Communication Association. Key publications include “Inequities of Race, Place, and Gender Among the Communication Citation Elite, 2000–2019” (Journal of Communication, 2023), “#PoliticalCommunicationSoWhite: Race and Politics in Nine Communication Journals, 1991-2021” (Political Communication, 2023), “Weaponizing Reproductive Rights: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of White Nationalist Discussions of Abortions Online” (Information, Communication & Society, 2022), “Vaccine Discourse in White Nationalist Online Communication” (Social Science & Medicine, 2022), and “Making Academia Suck Less: An Ethics of Care for Early Career Digital Media Researchers” (New Media & Society, 2024). These contributions have advanced understandings of inequities, extremism, and ethical research in communication.