Faculty

Profile

**On leave Fall 2025/Spring 2026**

JULIA SONNEVEND is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications and Co-Director of the Center for the American Experience at The New School. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. A scholar of media, democracy, and culture, her research explores the subtle yet powerful forces—such as “event,” “charm,” and “courage”—that shape the narratives and collective experiences that define us.

She is the author of Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024; Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event; and co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, NPR, BBC Newshour, The Times Literary Supplement, Teen Vogue, Times Higher Education, and Bloomberg News, among others.

Her scholarly work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, The International Journal of Press/Politics, Media, Culture & Society, and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. She co-edits the forum section of the Journal of Communication, the flagship journal of the International Communication Association.

Sonnevend has held fellowships at institutions worldwide, including Freie Universität Berlin, Central European University in Budapest, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Raised by two librarians  in Budapest during Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, she brings a lived perspective on political transformation to her interdisciplinary scholarship and institutional service. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an LL.M. from Yale Law School.

Degrees Held

PhD in Communications, Columbia University, 2013

LLM, Yale Law School, 2007

Recent Publications

Books: 

Sonnevend, J. (2024). Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics. Princeton University Press.

   Translation: Hungarian (Open Books, 2024) 

Sonnevend, J. (2016). Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Translation: Hungarian (Corvina Publisher, 2018) 

Greenhow, C.,Sonnevend J., & Agur, C. (Eds.). (2016). Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Journal articles:

Pooley, K., & Sonnevend, J. (2025). A forum for books, Journal of Communication, 75(1), 79–80,

Sumiala, J., Harju, A. A., & Sonnevend, J. (2025). Goodnight Ma’am The Queen’s death as a media event and the contestation of legacies in live participation. Media, Culture & Society. 

Sonnevend, J., & Kövesdi, V. (2023). More Than Just a Strongman: The Strategic Construction of Viktor Orbán’s Charismatic Authority on Facebook. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 0(0). 

Sonnevend, J. & Steiert, O. (2022). The Power of Predictability: How Angela Merkel Constructed Her Authenticity on Instagram. New Media & Society, 0(0). 

Sonnevend, J. (2020). A virus as an Icon: The 2020 Pandemic in Images. American Journal of Cultural Sociology. 12, 451-461.

Sonnevend, J. & Katz, Y. (2020). Capturing Hearts: Charm, Personal Magnetism and The Iranian Nuclear Deal in the American and Israeli Press. Journalism Studies, 21 (11):1551–1570.

Sonnevend, J. & Kim, Y. (2020). An unlikely seducer: Kim Jong-un’s charm offensive from the PyeongChang Winter Olympics until the Trump-Kim summit. International Journal of Communication, 14, 1398–1420.

Sonnevend, J. (2019) Charm offensive: mediatized country image transformations in international relations. Information, Communication & Society,  22(5), 695-701.

Sonnevend, J. (2018). The lasting charm of Media Events. Media, Culture & Society 40(1), 122-126.

Sonnevend, J. (2018).  Interruptions of time: The coverage of the missing Malaysian plane MH370 and the concept of “events” in media research. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 19(1), 75-92.

Sonnevend, J. (May 25, 2017). Our New Walls: The Rise of Separation Barriers in the Age of Globalization. E-International Relations (also published on Public Seminar).

Sonnevend, J. (2015). “Symbol of Hope for a World Without Walls”: The Fall of the Berlin Wall as a Global Iconic Event. Divinatio, 39-40, 223-233 (also translated into Bulgarian)

Sonnevend, J. (2013). Counterrevolutionary icons: The representation of the 1956 ‘counterrevolution’ in the Hungarian communist press. Journalism Studies, 14(3), 336-354.

Special issues in peer-reviewed journals:

Sonnevend, J. (2018). “Media Events Today”, Media, Culture & Society, 40(1), 110-113

Bodker, H., & Sonnevend, J. (2018). “The ShiftingTemporalities of Journalism”, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 19(1), 3-6

Peer-reviewed bibliography:

Sonnevend, J. (2017). Media Events. In Moy, P. (Ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Communication. New York: Oxford University Press.

Book chapters:

Sonnevend, J. & Steiert, O. (2022) “Seeing a Crisis Through Media: Narrating the Coronavirus Pandemic”, In J. Witte, S. Pickard, & M. Welker (Eds), The Impact of the Media on Character Formation, Ethical Education, and the Communication of Values in Late Modern Pluralistic Societies. (pp. 137-150). Evangelische Verlangsanstalt: University of Heidelberg.

Sonnevend, J. (2020). The East in You Never Leaves. In Laczo, F. & Gabrijelcic, L. L. (Eds.) The Legacy of Division: East and West After 1989. Budapest: CEU Press. [also published on Eurozine and Public Seminar, and translated into Slovene]

Sonnevend, J. (2018). Facts (Almost) Never Win Over Myths. In Boczkowski, P. & Papacharissi, Z. (Eds.) Trump and the Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sonnevend, J. (2016). Event. In Peters, B. (Ed.), Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (pp. 109-118). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Balkin, J. M., & Sonnevend, J. (2016). The digital transformation of education. In Greenhow, C., Sonnevend J., & Agur, C. (Eds.), Education and social media: Toward a digital future (pp. 9-25). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sonnevend, J. (2016). More hope! Ceremonial media events are still important in the 21^st century. In Fox, A. (Ed.), Global Perspectives on Media Events in Contemporary Society (pp. 132-141). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Selected Media

The Charisma-vs.-Charm Election The Atlantic, October 26, 2024

How Powerful is Political Charm? The New Yorker, September 24, 2024

“The VP Debate Shows How Performance Shapes Our Democracy.” Time Magazine, October 2, 2024. 

“Time Walz’s Joyful Charm.” Time Magazine, August 8, 2024.

"'The Big Clean Up': The 2020 Pandemic as a Representational Crisis," SSRC Items, September 27, 2020

"Mekkora Orbán vonzereje, és miért ilyen fontos, hogy van neki?" 24, August 13, 2019

"The East in You Never Leaves," Public Seminar, March 16, 2019

"Why We Need More Essays about Media," Public Seminar, March 6, 2018

"Megingott a liberális világrend, újra büszkén lehet falat építeni," 24, February 21, 2019

Cited in "'Trump and the Media': Work-in-Progress Dispatches from a Sinking Ship," Pop Matters, October 29, 2018

"'There Was No Berlin Wall, and It Never Fell'," Research Matters, July 5, 2017

"Our New Walls," Public Seminar, June 16, 2017

Awards And Honors