Stephen Warren is media effects and sports communication scholar who previous lectured at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There, he had a dual appointment in the Departments of Journalism and Advertising, where he designed and taught journalism and advertising courses, including Classics of Sports Journalism, Sports Public Relations, Intro to Sports Media, Crisis Communication, and Working with News Media. He also co-organized the inaugural Frank Center panel on sports and social media with professional sports journalists, the U of I Athletic Director, and a student athlete, and was the faculty sponsor for a Big Ten Town Hall, in which journalism students from each university in the Big Ten Conference were able to participate in a mock press conference with the conference’s Commissioner.
Stephen’s research focuses on media psychology, entertainment theory, and sports communication regarding television, sports, new media technologies, and audience behavior and habits, primarily using quantitative methods. He earned his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where his dissertation examined how New England Patriot fans’ political and team fandom identities informed their responses to a news story about a Patriots’ player having associations with a far-right militia group, and how/if those responses affected their subsequent psychological health. In addition, he has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Psychology of Popular Media, the Journal of Children and Media, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and he has contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Electoral Persuasion (Oxford, 2019), Video Game Influences on Aggression, Cognition, and Attention (Springer, 2018), The International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology (Wiley, 2021), and the Routledge Handbook of Sport Fans and Fandom (Routledge, 2022).
He is also a proud Syracuse sports fan, having earned two master’s degrees from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Departments
Communication Studies
Education
- Ph.D., Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- M.A., Communication and Media Studies, Syracuse University
- M.A., Television, Radio & Film, Syracuse University
- B.S., Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University