Alice E. Marwick is the Microsoft Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, and Principal Researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life, which she co-founded, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also the editor of the Bulletin of Technology and Public Life, an Andrew Carnegie Faculty Fellow, a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Media Law and Policy at UNC, and Advisor to the Data & Society Research Institute. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Her 2023 book, The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media (Yale), examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender identity, race, sexuality, and socio-economic status. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Down the Rabbit Hole: The Intellectual Journey of Violent Racists, Conspiracy Theorists, Flat Earthers, and Other Americans on the Fringe, which uses digital ethnography, interviews, and qualitative content and discourse analysis to understand how people come to believe fringe, extremist, and conspiratorial disinformation they encounter on social platforms.
In 2017, she co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online for Data & Society, a flagship report examining far-right online subcultures’ use of social media to spread disinformation, for which she was named one of 2017’s Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. She is also the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene which examines how people seek social status through online visibility, and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017). Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Luminate Group, the Hewlett Foundation, the Digital Trust Foundation and the Social Science Research Council, and she has held fellowships at the Data & Society Research Institute and the Institute of Arts & Humanities at UNC-CH. In 2021 she won UNC’s Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement.
Marwick was formerly Director of the McGannon Communication Research Center and Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and a postdoctoral researcher (and PhD intern) in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. She has a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from New York University, a MA in Communication from the University of Washington, and a BA from Wellesley College.
Alice is married and has two children. She is a pop culture enthusiast, a Drag Race superfan, and a chronic fashion victim.
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[Academic CV] (PDF, January 2024)