About MARIAL

Calendar of Events

Research and Publications

Fellowships

Amy Aidman

College of Media, University of Illinois, associate dean for research
and associate professor in the Institute of Communications Research. (on leave during her MARIAL fellowship)

Project Title: Media as Myth and Ritual in Family Life

Amy Aidman is a senior research fellow at the MARIAL Center. She is co-author of Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children: When Harry Potter Meets Pokemon in Disneyland, an international study of children’s fantasies and their relationship to media with the IZI, a research institute of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation. She is a contributing author of two volumes Creating Competent Communicators: Activities for Teaching Speaking, Listening, and Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom, which were written to complement National Communication Association standards.

She was research director for the Center for Media Education in Washington D.C., and has worked with the ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education and the National Parent Information Network, where she oversaw the creation of a statewide electronic information service for parents and families in Illinois. She was a visiting lecturer in the University of Haifa’s department of communication.

Her academic, professional, and administrative background gives her a unique mix of experience. She enjoys working on projects that involve community engagement, in which the work of faculty and students is articulated with issues and problems of society and culture.

She received a bachelor's of science in journalism and mass communications from the University of Florida, Gainesville and completed a one-year overseas program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has a master's degree in telecommunication arts from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a Ph.D. in communications from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include media in family life,  childhood and culture, cultural and political aspects of electronic media, child development, education, parenting and communication policy issues, media literacy, prosocial potential of electronic media, children as consumers, cross-cultural issues in communication research, and technology and impacts on society.