I am a lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I received my PhD from the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University in 2019. Between 2018-2020 I was a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

My research examines meaning-making at the intersection of media producers, texts, and audiences. Placing a special emphasis on the phenomenon of polysemy (meaning multiplicity), I ask questions like: Why do we interpret the same content in diverging, at times contrasting, ways? What makes media messages open to different interpretations? How do users exploit the affordances of social media platforms to articulate their own interpretations of mainstream media? What are the social, economic, cultural, and political ramifications of meaning multiplicity?

What I love most about polysemy is the concept’s perverseness and versatility, which means that I get to study all sorts of media and topic areas. I have explored so far various fields of cultural production rife with polysemy: popular culture on the internet, with an emphasis on humor and parody in user-generated-content, journalistic storytelling, with a focus on the coverage of income inequality and corporate social responsibility, and the negotiation over meaning on social media platforms in contexts of war and protest.

I also direct an interdisciplinary research program with my sons Noam and Ziv in which we explore fundamental questions about physics (e.g., forces of gravity and velocity involved in an egg smashing on the kitchen floor), conflict resolution (e.g., jointly deciding about the absolutely-last-I-will-not-negotiate-further book before bedtime), and philosophy (sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never heart me?)