The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication Welcomes Three Visiting Scholars for Fall 2025
Pallavi Guha, Julia Sonnevend, and Samhita Sunya will join the center this fall.
The Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce that three visiting scholars will join the center this fall.
Pallavi Guha, Julia Sonnevend, and Samhita Sunya will join CARGC as visiting scholars for the fall 2025 semester. During their time at the center, they will develop their own research projects and take an active part in the life of the center by mentoring CARGC fellows and participating in center events and research activities.
“Visiting scholars are an important component of the intellectual community at CARGC. We are thrilled to be hosting three brilliant scholars doing timely research across a variety of media forms and regional contexts,” says CARGC Associate Director Juan Llamas-Rodriguez. “I am certain that the CARGC Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellows will be eager to get to know and learn from Dr. Guha, Dr. Sonnevend, and Dr. Sunya, and I look forward to the future collaborations that this semester’s conversations will inspire.”
Pallavi Guha
Dr. Pallavi Guha is the author of Hear # MeToo in India: News, Social Media, and Anti-Rape and Sexual Harassment Activism, an Associate Professor of Journalism at Towson University, and news editor of the Baltimore Watchdog. Her book has been positively reviewed in the press and is available in 932 libraries worldwide. Her research includes anti-rape and sexual harassment activism on mass media and social media platforms, political news engagement of women from diasporic communities, and gender roles in the electoral campaign and social media. She has been recognized with awards and honors in the industry and academia, highlighting distinguished academic excellence and innovative research in journalism. In 2022, Dr. Guha contributed as a research stakeholder to the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, an initiative led by President Biden, as part of the National Plan on Violence Against Women. Dr. Guha’s career spans two decades of being a journalist, journalism researcher, and educator. She has a Ph.D. in journalism and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland. Prior to academia, Dr. Guha worked for leading media organizations, including BBC News and The Times of India, and had the distinct opportunity as a journalist to cover elections in India, the UK, and the US. Dr. Guha is listed as an academic expert in media, politics, and gender, including the safety of journalists and the Women's Media Center (WMC).
Julia Sonnevend
Dr. Julia Sonnevend is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School. A scholar of media, culture and public life, her research explores the subtle yet powerful forces—such as “event,” “charm,” and “courage”—that shape the narratives and collective experiences that define us.
She is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024; Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event; and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future. Her work has been profiled in The New Yorker and featured in The Atlantic, Time, NPR, BBC Newshour, the Times Literary Supplement, Teen Vogue, The Times Higher Education and Bloomberg News, among others.
Her academic work appears in leading peer-reviewed journals, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Media, Culture & Society, and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
She has held fellowships at Freie Universität in Berlin, Central European University in Budapest and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Raised by two librarians in Budapest during Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, she brings to her interdisciplinary scholarship and institutional service a deep, lived experience of political upheaval and social transformation. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an LL.M. from Yale Law School.
Samhita Sunya
Dr. Samhita Sunya is Associate Professor of Cinema in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship takes feminist approaches to cross-border media histories, as it aims to understand how popular media and popular politics have shaped one another and, in turn, the world. She is guest co-editor of a “South by South/West Asia” special issue of Film History (2020), reviews editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and author of Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay (University of California Press, 2022). Sirens of Modernity was an Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jean Scaglione South Asia Book Prize, and a Finalist for the American Council of Learned Societies’ book award for Multimodal Open Access projects. Samhita is currently working on another book-length project titled Agents on Location, which examines Indian Ocean histories of location shooting and espionage genres, as intertwined with informal and clandestine practices of media distribution. Her first film, an 8-minute paper animation titled Conference of the Moths (2024), recently premiered at the DisOrient Asian American Film Festival and is slated to screen at other national and international festivals over the coming months. She dreams of continuing to work in moving-image and narrative formats: to offer a cultural history of the ubiquitous South Asian tabletop game of carrom through a collection of memoirs and short stories, for example. To this end, she currently co-directs the Games Lab in UVA’s Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures.
About CARGC Visiting Scholar Program
CARGC offers semester-long visiting fellowship positions for a limited number of visiting scholars from institutions other than the University of Pennsylvania whose research aligns with current CARGC research themes. To learn more about the visiting scholar program at CARGC and read testimonials from our former visiting scholars, please visit this webpage.
