Celeste Wagner

Celeste Wagner’s research examines how and why everyday people embrace or resist social change, with a focus on gender issues and feminism. She also studies media reception more broadly, including how audiences engage with news and entertainment. She has conducted panel studies, interviews, virtual focus groups, nationally representative surveys, survey experiments, and other cross-national mixed-method research. Her recent publications analyze feminist advocacy in Argentina and the U.S., the reception of Turkish TV dramas in Argentina (both in the Journal of Communication), global communication as epistemology (Media, Culture & Society), and emotional experiences with news and misinformation in the U.S. (Journalism and Digital Journalism). Her coauthored book, The Patina of Distrust (MIT Press, 2025), has won the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Prize Book Award, the NCA Political Communication Division’s Roderick P. Hart Outstanding Book Award, and (jointly) ASIS&T’s Best Information Science Book Award, and received honorable mentions from ICA and APSA (all in 2026).

Her current book project, Under the Wave: Why Feminist Ideas Land Differently Among Everyday People (under review), is based on her multiple-award-winning dissertation, which received four awards in 2023: the Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award from NCA; the Best Dissertation Award from ICA’s Global Communication and Social Change Division; the Lynda Lee Kaid Outstanding Dissertation Award from NCA’s Political Communication Division; and the Best Dissertation Award from NCA’s International and Intercultural Communication Division. She also received the 2025 Distinguished Achievement in Research Award from Rutgers University’s Department of Journalism and Media Studies and was named the 2023 Junior International Educator of the Year by the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications.

Wagner’s other current projects examine how liberals and conservatives in the U.S. interpret the achievements and drawbacks of #MeToo, drawing on a panel study and interviews; how Americans evaluated sexual harassment accusations against politicians over time, using panel data and interviews; how liberal and conservative young women in the U.S. interpret women’s issues through social media consumption, based on focus groups, among others.

Ph.D., Communication, University of Pennsylvania
M.A., Communication, University of Pennsylvania
Licenciatura, Comunicación, Universidad de San Andrés