The 10th Edition of the textbook, Thinking through Communication, co-authored by Adam Roth, Brenton J. Malin, and Sarah Trenholm, is now available from Routledge. This fully updated tenth edition for hybrid introductory communication courses provides a balanced introduction to the fundamental theories and principles of communication. The book explores communication in a variety of contexts, […]

Commercial Intimacy: Affinity and the Marketplace, co-edited by Rick Popp, Brenton J. Malin, and Wendy Woloson, is now available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. The collection of essays explores how marketers have leveraged feelings of personal familiarity in modern consumer capitalism and is part of the series Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture. How, […]

Professor Malin’s new essay, “‘I Never Liked Him’: Ryan Adams and the Toxification of Masculinity in the Post-MeToo Digital Era,” was recently published online by the journal Women’s Studies in Communication. This essay uses data analysis to trace the Twitter conversation that developed around the musician Ryan Adams following accusations of sexual misconduct directed at […]

Professor Malin’s essay, “Advertising as a Tax Expenditure: The Tax Deduction for Advertising and America’s Hidden Public Media System,” has been published in the most recent issue of Political Economy of Communication. Here is the essay’s abstract: This article explores a series of media policy and political-economic issues created by the United States Federal tax […]

Professor Malin has published a new essay in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, entitled “Intimate Objects: Post-Network Television and the Object Oriented Aesthetics of Breaking Bad.” In this essay, I address questions of televisual point-of-view by attending to a unique set of camera shots used in the drama Breaking Bad. While point-of-view shots […]

Professor Malin’s essay, “Contextual Materialism: Mereology, Sociality and the Vague Ontology of Media Objects,” was recently published through the journal Communication Theory. A companion piece to his earlier Communication Theory essay, “Communicating with Objects: Ontology, Object-Orientations, and the Politics of Communication,” which offered a critique of object oriented approaches to objects in general and media […]

An essay by Brent Malin, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, and Curry Chandler, a graduate student in the same department, appears in the June 2017 issue of Communication, Culture, and Critique. The essay, “Free to Work Anxiously: Splintering Precarity among Drivers for Uber and Lyft,” draws on […]

Professor Malin will deliver a Keynote Address for “Emotions, Media and History: Theory and Practice,” the first symposium of the new Emotions and Media Research Cluster of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, at the University of Adelaide, September 23, 2016.  Professor Malin’s lecture, “When New Arguments Get Old: […]

Professor Malin’s article, “Communicating with Objects: Ontology, Object-Orientations, and the Politics of Communication,” was published in the August 2016 volume of Communication Theory.  The article offers a critique of the recent turn to objects as illustrated by Object Oriented Ontology and similar approaches.  It begins with a discussion of Alexander Galloway’s claims that object-oriented thought […]

Professor Malin’s article, “The Path to the Machine: Affect Studies, Technology, and the Question of Ineffability,” was published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies in February, 2016. Here is the article’s abstract: From the 1990s to the early twenty-first century, a range of writers in sociology, history, and cultural studies would increasingly see emotion as an […]