Dannagal Young

Dannagal G. Young (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is a Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware and Director of the University's Center for Political Communication. She studies the content, audience, and effects of nontraditional political information and how people make sense of their political worlds. She has published over seventy academic articles and book chapters on the content, psychology, and effects of political information, satire, and misinformation.

Her latest book, "Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation" explores the demand side of misinformation - that is, why we are attracted to falsehoods. It was published in Oct 2023 with JHU Press. Her first book "Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laugher" in the U.S. examines satire and outrage as the logical extensions of the respective psychological profiles of liberals and conservatives (Oxford University Press, 2020) and is the winner of the 2021 Roderick Hart Book Award from the Political Communication division of the National Communication Association.

Dr. Young's 2020 TED Talk explaining how our psychology shapes our politics, and how media exploit these relationships, has been viewed over 2 Million times. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and Op-eds in outlets including Vox, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has appeared on CNN, PBS Newshour, ABC News, NPR, and various national and international podcasts. As of 2024, her research has been cited in over 120 popular press articles, news stories, and interviews at such outlets as The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, Christian Science Monitor, Variety, the New York Times, the Atlantic, PBS, Slate, and Vox. Her popular University of Delaware course "Propaganda and Persuasion" was released by The Great Courses in 2023.

In recognition of her public facing work, in 2021, Dr. Young became the inaugural recipient of the Dr. Robert M. Entman Award in Democracy and Political Communication from the School of Media and Public Affairs (SMPA) at The George Washington University. Young is a Research Fellow with the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication and was awarded the University of Delaware's Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014. She holds affiliations with the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center and the University of Arizona's National Institute for Civil Discourse (NICD), where she co-edited of "A Crisis of Civility: Political Discourse and its Discontents" (Routledge, 2018).

Dr. Young is also an improvisational comedian, performing with ComedySportz Philadelphia since 1999.