Faculty Fellows

Andrew H. Bellisari

Andrew H. Bellisari is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. He specializes in the history of decolonization in North Africa and Southeast Asia, and his research addresses questions related to warfare, post-colonial state- and nation-building, and civil society. Previously, he was a founding faculty member at Fulbright University Vietnam in Hô Chí Minh City and a Vietnam Program Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Bellisari received his Ph.D. in History from Harvard University.

Kathryn Cramer Brownell

Kathryn Cramer Brownell is the founding director of CAPT. She is a professor in the Department of History and senior editor of the “Made By History” column at TIME Magazine. Her research focuses on the intersections of media and politics in modern America with a particular emphasis on the American presidency. She is the author of 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News (Princeton University Press, 2023) and Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life (University of North Carolina Press, 2014). She also writes regularly for outlets that include, Atlantic, TIME Magazine, Washington Post, Reuters, Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she regularly offer historical expertise for national and international newspapers and on radio and television programs, including the New York Times, NPR, the BBC’s History Hour, the History Channel, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and more.

Jessica R. Collier

Jessica R. Collier is an assistant professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication. Her research lies at the intersection of media, technology, and democracy. She uses experimental and survey methodologies to explore how the information people encounter on digital and social media shape their civic and political attitudes and behaviors. Her work has been published in Political Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and new media & society, among others. Dr. Collier received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

Austin R. Cooper

Austin R. Cooper is an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University and Senior Research Associate at SciencesPo CERI. His research relies on declassified US archival documents to understand the role of nuclear technologies in US foreign policy, including relationships with allies, adversaries, and international organizations. He is finishing a book about France’s emergence as a nuclear weapon state during the 1960s and its first nuclear testing program in the Algerian Sahara at that time. He has published related work in the Nonproliferation Review and Cold War History. He completed fellowships in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He earned a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Matthew N. Hannah

Matthew N. Hannah is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Information Studies at Purdue University, and he was a Fulbright Specialist to Morocco in 2022. His research focuses on the political economy and public impact of online information, especially pertaining to conspiracy theories, mis/disinformation, and social media. He has published in the Journal of Information Literacy, First Monday, Social Media + Society, and The Journal of Magazine Media, and he has chapters on conspiracy theories in the edited collections Conspiracy and Extremism in New Times and The Spectacle of Online Life (Lexington Books). He also edited the special collection, "Paranoid Publics," for Frontiers in Communication, and this cluster addresses conspiracy theories' impact on the public sphere. Before joining the faculty at Purdue, he was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in Public and Digital Humanities at University of Iowa's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. 

Jennifer Hoewe

Jennifer Hoewe is an associate professor within the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Political Science. She studies media psychology and political communication and has authored more than 50 scholarly publications. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she is the former head of the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

Michelle LaBonte

Michelle LaBonte is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. Her research focuses on the history of diagnostics and therapeutics. Her first book, Challenging Diagnosis: Cystic Fibrosis, Diagnostic Technologies, and the Persistence of Uncertainty in Medicine, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Challenging Diagnosis examines the sociocultural and scientific factors that have contributed to diagnostic uncertainty in medicine, foregrounding the impact of such uncertainty on patients and families. Some of her recent work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Medicine and the Journal of the History of Biology. She received a PhD in the History of Science and a PhD in Virology, both from Harvard University.

Zachary Loeb

Zachary Loeb is an assistant professor in the department of history at Purdue University. His research focuses on the history of technology, the history of disasters, and the history of technological disasters. He is currently working on a book project exploring the year 2000 computer crisis (better known as Y2K).

Diana Zulli

Diana Zulli is an associate professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. Her research focuses on the interaction of communication theory, digital technology, and political rhetoric. Specifically, she is interested in how communication theories function in, and are affected by, the rapidly changing digital communication environment, how news media shapes political discourse, and how digital technology affects social and political processes. Her work has been published in a number of communication journals including Communication Theory, New Media & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Information, Communication, & Society, Social Media + Society, and the International Journal of Communication, among others. Her teaching areas include American political communication, public relations, and crisis communication.