James E. Katz, Ph.D., Dr.H.C., serves as the Peking University Distinguished Professor at its School of New Media as well as the endowed Feld Family Professor of Emerging Media at Boston University's College of Communication, where he also directs the Center for Mobile Communication Studies and Division of Emerging Media.
Dr. Katz’s has conducted widely cited research on the social aspects of mobile communication, the internet, and new media. Author or co-author of more than 100 scientific articles and papers, he also holds two patents in the telecommunications area. His writings appearingf in Chinese include Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement, Expression (with Ronald E. Rice) [互联网使用的社会影响上网、参与和互动.Hu Lian Wang Shih Yong De She Hui Ying Hsang, Beijing: Commercial Press] and 传播视角下的社会网络与公民新闻对传统报纸的挑战 in 新闻与传播研究,第十九卷 第三期 2012年6月 CN11-3320/G2.
His latest book is Philosophy of Emerging Media, co-edited with Juliet Floyd (Oxford University Press). He is also the co-author of The Social Media President: Barack Obama and the Politics of Citizen Engagement, published in 2013 by Macmillan. Among his other books are Magic in the Air: Mobile Communication and the Transformation of Social Life and Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies.
Prior to his Boston University appointment, he was Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Communication at Rutgers University (the title being the highest honor that Rutgers can bestow on one of its faculty) and served two terms as chair of its Department of Communication. Preceding his tenure at Rutgers, Katz was a Distinguished Member of Staff and director of the social science research unit at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore).
In 2013, he received an honorary doctorate from Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem (Budapest University of Technology and Economics, BME), the world's oldest technological university. Among his other awards are the Ogburn career achievement award from the American Sociological Association and the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Twentieth Century Communications History. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the International Communication Association (ICA). Katz has served a term as editor of a leading journal, Human Communication Research and has also won fellowships at Harvard, Princeton and MIT.
