William H. Dutton is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California (since 2002). He is living in Oxford and affiliated with the Oxford Internet Institute as a Senior Fellow, and the Global Cyber Security Capacity Center (GCSCC) of the Department of Computer Science as an Oxford Martin Fellow. In addition, Bill is a Research Fellow at the Quello Center of Michigan State University, and a Visiting Professor in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds.
Prior to returning to Oxford, Bill was the Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy, Department of Media and Information in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University (MSU), where he was Director of the Quello Center from 2014-18.
Before starting his Quello Center role, Bill was founding director of the Oxford Internet Institute (2002-2011) at the University of Oxford, for which he received a lifetime achievement award from the department. At Oxford, Bill was the first Professor of Internet Studies and a Professorial Fellow of Balliol College from 2002-2014, when he became Director of the Quello Center.
From 1980, until moving to Oxford in 2002, Bill was a Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he continues an affiliation as Emeritus Professor. While at the Annenberg School, Bill was a Fulbright Scholar based in the UK at Brunel University, and later took a leave of absence to be National Director of the UK’s Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT).
His most recent books include The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (OUP 2013), four edited volumes on Politics and the Internet (Routledge 2014), and a reader entitled Society and the Internet, with Mark Graham (OUP 2014), with a new and revised second edition (OUP 2019). His most recent edited book is entitled A Research Agenda for Digital Politics (Elgar, 2020). His latest book is The Fifth Estate: The Power Shift of the Digital Age (OUP, 2023).
His next book will be an advanced introduction to political communication.
As founding director of the OII during its first decade (2002-2011), he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the department. He is also the first recipient of the International Communication Association’s Fred Williams’ award for contributions to the study of communication and technology. Since then, he was awarded the William F. Ogburn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association in 2014, and in 2015, was named an ICA Fellow by the Board of Directors of the International Communication Association. In 2017, before returning to Oxford, Bill was awarded a medallion for his contributions to Michigan State University.