Elena Maris
Assistant Professor
Communication
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About
Elena Maris is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to joining UIC, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective. She received her Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Maris’s research is concerned with the interactions and tensions between media/tech industries and their users or audiences. She is particularly interested in the ways they use technology to understand and influence one another. She also studies how people experience and leverage their identities through their experiences with popular culture, technology and the internet. Her work has been published in journals like New Media & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Feminist Media Studies. Her research has been featured in outlets like The New York Times, Wired, Marketplace, and Forbes. She advises on matters of user/industry relations, audience measurement and research, platform politics, social media, digital fandom and online communities, and LGBTQ+ and other marginalized users. She has advised and shared her insights with organizations and companies like The Sundance Institute, The National Endowment for the Arts, Tumblr, and Xbox.