Associate Professor
About
Brian Weeks is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media and a Faculty Associate in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on three general topics: (1) how individuals are exposed to, engage with, evaluate, and learn from news and socially shared political information in digital media; (2) the relationships between (partisan) media, political misinformation, and political misperceptions; and (3) the influence of emotions--particularly anger--on exposure to online political content and its effects.
Weeks is the author of the forthcoming book (2024), Angry and Wrong: The Emotional Dynamics of Partisan Media and Political Misperceptions (Cambridge University Press). He has published more than 40 articles in leading journals in the field of communication including the Journal of Communication, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Research, New Media & Society, and elsewhere. His research has received awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the National Communication Association, the American Political Science Association, and the World Association for Public Opinion Research. At Michigan he co-founded the Politics and Communication Lab (PAC LAB) and is a core member of the Political Communication Working Group. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.
His teaching reflects these research interests, including COMM 261, Views on the News: What Shapes our Media Content; COMM 410, The Internet and Political Communication; COMM 468, Political Misinformation and Misperceptions (Senior Capstone); and COMM 840, Political Communication (Graduate Seminar).
Weeks received a B.A. in journalism and mass communication and political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, a M.A. in mass communication from the University of Minnesota in 2010, and a Ph.D. in communication from the Ohio State University in 2014. Prior to joining the University of Michigan he was a faculty member at the University of Vienna in Austria.
