Jacob Dittmer

Biography:

Jacob was born and raised on a farm in Illinois not far from the Mississippi river and Mark Twain's hometown. Upon completing a BA in Journalism at the University of Illinois, he remained in Champaign-Urbana working as a journalist covering the town's independent music scene, its local businesses, its neighboring rural governments, and much more.

After a few years, Jacob decided to attend graduate school at the University of Oregon and took the Oregon trail (I-80) in the fall of 2007. There, he got to explore his myriad of media interests and assist professors in courses on Media Law, Grammar and Disney. The summer between his two-year Master's program was spent in Washington D.C. working for the Consumers Union as a media policy analyst and media relations practitioner. He completed his Master's Thesis on rhetorical framing of Iraq War violence and graduated in June 2009. Later that year, he began work on a PhD.

Jacob's academic interests are in consumer culture, media literacy, news media and journalism, cultural studies and the political economy of film, television, music and video games. Non-academic interests include beer-making/drinking, photography, listening to records and thrifting for items of times past.