Courtesy University of Southern California

Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. A national authority on religion and the media as both a journalist and a scholar, her expertise includes religion, politics and the news media as well as religion and the entertainment media. Professor Winston's current research interests include religion and the news, religious narratives on commercial television, and the role of religion in American ideology and identity.

Professor Winston’s current research is on religion and the news media. The Oxford Handbook on Religion and the American News Media (Oxford University Press) has just been published, and Heartland Religion: The Reagan Revolution and American News Media (Oxford University Press) is due next year.

Between 1983 and 1995, Professor Winston covered religion at the Raleigh News and Observer, the Dallas Times Herald and the Baltimore Sun and contributed regularly to the Dallas Morning News. She has won numerous press association awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her work in Raleigh, Dallas and Baltimore. Her articles also have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education among other publications. Winston’s blogging about religion and media can also be found on her Web site, http://www.trans-missions.org.

In 1996, Winston received a Ph.D. from Princeton University. She also holds Master’s degrees from Harvard Divinity School and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her work in American religion has explored evangelicalism, gender, consumer culture and urbanization. Her published books are Red Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Harvard, 1999), Faith in the Market: Religion and Urban Commercial Culture (Rutgers, 2003) and Small Screen, Picture: Lived Religion and Television (Baylor, 2009).