Communication Department Faculty

Michael Serazio is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Boston College. His research and teaching focuses on media production, advertising, popular culture, political communication, and new media.

His latest book is The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture (NYU Press, 2019). A behind-the-scenes investigation that draws upon dozens of interviews with leaders and professionals in media and business, The Power of Sports provocatively analyzes how sports culture explains and reflects contemporary American life – from journalism to politics to commercialism to gender. His previous book, Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013), investigated the integration of brands into entertainment content, social patterns, and digital platforms. It received the Susanne K. Langer Award from the Media Ecology Association and the National Communication Association’s Visual Communication Book of the Year.

He has other scholarly work appearing in the Journal of Communication, Media Culture & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, the Journal of Consumer Culture, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, and Television & New Media, among other venues. His studies of campaign consultants have been honored with the Bruce Gronbeck Political Communication Research Award and the National Communication Association’s Top Article in Political Communication. He’s also received Top Paper awards from ICA’s Sports Communication, Media Industry Studies, and Popular Communication divisions and NCA’s Communication & Sport and American Studies divisions. He is currently working on a book about how authenticity is strategized in politics, advertising, and pop culture.

Serazio received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he won the National Communication Association’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He also holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of San Francisco and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. A former staff writer for the Houston Press, an alternative newsweekly, his reporting was recognized as a finalist for the Livingston Awards and he has continued to write essays on media and culture for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, The New Republic, The Nation, Bloomberg, Adweek, and Salon. He serves on Boston College’s Journalism program steering committee and the Church in the 21^st Century’s advisory committee and previously served on the editorial board for the National Seminar of Jesuit Higher Education, which publishes Conversations magazine. He is a grateful recipient of the Boston College “Teacher of the Year” Award.

A native San Diegan, Mike enjoys running, travel, food culture, electronic music, opinion writing, rooting (usually frustratingly) for the Padres and Chargers, and, above all, spending time with his wife and daughter. His webpage, with links to writing, can be found at http://sites.google.com/site/linkedatserazio and he can be contacted at serazio@bc.edu.