(Ph.D. Rutgers University) teaches in the areas of Media, Culture Studies and Social Psychology. He has served as chairperson of the Department of Sociology and president of the Rider AAUP. He was 2008 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Italy and a recipient of the Iorio Scholarly Achievement Award. He authored The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics and Individuals (Routledge, 2007) and The Making of American Audiences from Stage to Television, 1750-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), which received the American Culture Association Cawelti Prize and the International Communication Association’s Best Book Award for 2000-2001. He is editor of Media and Public Spheres (Palgrave, 2007), and For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption (Temple University Press, 1990); and has published numerous articles in American studies, sociology, history and communication journals. He is a member of the advisory boards of Popular Communication, a journal of the International Communication Association, and Particip@tions, an on-line journal of audience research. He is currently writing a global history of screen culture, a history of representations of manual labor and laborers in Twentieth-Century American culture, and an introduction to sociology textbook.