RESEARCHER. PROFESSOR. JOURNALIST AT HEART. WANDERER.
SUMMER HARLOW
AT A GLANCE
Summer Harlow is an award-winning researcher and the Associate Director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Her scholarly work focuses on the intersections of journalism, emerging technologies, and democracy and civic engagement, particularly in Latin America and the Global South.
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She is the author of books: Digital Native News and the Remaking of Latin American Mainstream and Alternative Journalism (Routledge, 2023), which won the 2024 Kappa Tau Alpha Frank Luther Mott Award and the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Book Prize, and Liberation Technology in El Salvador: Re-appropriating Social Media among Alternative Media Projects (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), which won the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Book Prize in 2018. She has written more than a dozen book chapters, and her work also has been published in top-tier, peer-reviewed journals like the Journal of Communication; International Journal of Press/Politics; New Media & Society; Digital Journalism; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; Information, Communication & Society; Journalism Studies; Journalism; Mass Communication & Society; Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media; International Journal of Communication; and the International Communication Gazette, among others. Currently she is an Associate Editor for Journalism Studies.
She has presented her research at AEJMC, ICA, IAMCR, WAPOR, ISOJ, and LASA, where her work has received numerous top-paper awards. She also was named a winner of the prestigious AEJMC Emerging Scholar award in 2018, and her dissertation won the Nafziger-White-Salwen Outstanding Dissertation Award from AEJMC. In 2018 she was recognized with the Outstanding Junior Woman Scholar Award from the Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication.
Since 2023, Dr. Harlow has served as the Associate Director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Previously she was an associate professor of journalism at Texas A&M and the University of Houston, and an assistant professor of social media at Florida State University. She teaches courses on social movements and news coverage, Latin America, globalization, social media, and immigration reporting.