It is with great pleasure that we announce that Dr Ben O'Loughlin, previously Associate Director of the New Political Communication Unit, will become its Co-Director from March 9, 2009. He will work alongside Professor Andrew Chadwick, Founding Director of the Unit, who will now become Co-Director.

About Dr Ben O'Loughlin

Ben O'Loughlin is Lecturer in International Relations. Ben specialises in international political communication. He is co-investigator of the ESRC-funded project, Legitimising the Discourses of Radicalisation: Political Violence in the New Media Ecology. He was recently a researcher on the ESRC project Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the Iraq War, part of the New Security Programme. Ben is a founding Editor of the new journal, Media, War and Conflict (Sage, from April 2008). His various projects are together at www.newmediaecology.net. This work on media and security is part of a broader interest in understanding the role and influence of political ideas, the translation and adaptation of ideas across different groups of actors and institutions, and the ways in which social and political life is becoming not so much mediated as mediatized.

Ben is co-convenor of the International Studies Association (ISA) workshop, ‘Great Powers after the Bush Presidency: Interests, Strategies and Narratives’. The workshop will take place on 14 February 2009 in New York City prior to the ISA Annual Convention, to be followed up at New Orleans at ISA 2010.

Ben is an Associate Member of the Centre for Research for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at The Open University and the Centre for Memory Studies at the University of Warwick. He also works with the Widening Participation Unit at Royal Holloway.

Ben has presented research to the No. 10 Policy Unit, Home Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, OFCOM, the European Commission and European Broadcasting Union (EBU). He has contributed to the New York Times, Sky News and Newsweek.