Regina M. Marchi

Regina Marchi is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and is also an affiliated professor with the Rutgers Department of Latino Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, San Diego. Prior to life in academia, she worked as a journalist in the US and Central America. An interdisciplinary scholar and ethnographer who studies the intersections of media, culture and politics, Dr. Marchi focuses on communication processes of populations historically marginalized from formal politics and news media because of their race, ethnicity, social class, immigration status, gender or age, and how various forms of media can advance or hinder possibilities for democratic expression and participation.

She is the author of Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon (Rutgers University Press: 2009 and 2022), which examines Latinx Day of the Dead celebrations as a form of alternative media in communicating about cultural identity and politics. This book received the 2010 national James W. Carey Award for Media Research from the Carl Couch Center for Media and Internet Research, and a 2010 International Latino Book Award in the category of Best Political/Historical Book. She published a substantially revised second edition of this book in 2022, which incorporates new information about the Internet and social media, new forms of commercialization, and updated examples of Day of the Dead altar exhibits and street processions as forms of political expression.

With Dr. Lynn Schofield Clark, Regina Marchi also wrote Young People and The Future of News: Social media and the rise of connective journalism (Cambridge University Press: 2017), an ethnography of low-income, minoritized high school students, their social media news sharing habits, and how youth socialize each other into becoming politically active. This book won the 2018 Nancy Baym Top Book Award from the international Association of Internet Researchers and the 2018 James W. Carey Award for Media Research.