Keynote Speaker TJ Billard 
Collaboration with ICR

TJ Billard, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University, where they are affiliated with the Center for Communication & Public Policy and the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. Outside of Northwestern, they are the founding executive director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies in Chicago—the leading academic organization dedicated to scholarship on the social, cultural, and political conditions of transgender life—and editor of the Center’s flagship journal, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Dr. Billard’s research spans political communication, the sociology of social movements, and transgender studies, with a primary focus on the relationship between media and the U.S. transgender rights movement. Their current major projects include a solo monograph on changing practices of media-focused activism in the transgender rights movement and an edited volume (co-edited with Professor Silvio Waisbord of the George Washington University) on public scholarship in communication studies.

This event is part of the College of Media Annual Theme Series.