Profile
**On leave Fall 2021 and Spring 2022**
Julia Sonnevend is Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School for Social Research. She has held fellowships at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, and the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology in New Haven. Her interdisciplinary work argues that much of everyday life rests on the unexpected, not on the planned. Regardless of the extensive rationalization and disenchantment of contemporary social life, people remain deeply influenced by stories, events, mythologies, totemic objects, and magnetic personalities. Research thus has to pay closer attention to the performative and emotional dimensions of social interaction and confront elements of the human condition that cannot be pinned down by definitions or numbers, covered by theories, or even captured by words.
Professor Sonnevend is the author of Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event (Oxford University Press, 2016) and is currently working on a new book about the role of “charm” in business, politics, artificial intelligence, and everyday social life. Her teaching includes classes on contemporary social theory, cultural sociology and visual media.
Please view her Research Matters profile for more information about Professor Sonnevend's work.
Degrees Held
PhD in Communications, Columbia University, 2013
LLM, Yale Law School, 2007
Recent Publications
Solo-authored book:
Sonnevend, J.(2016). Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reviews: The Times Higher Education;Journal of Communication; Journalism:Theory, Practice and Criticism; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly; Media, Culture & Society
Book award: Runner-up Best Book Award in the Global Communication and Social Change Division of the International Communication Association
Translation: Hungarian (Corvina Publisher, June 2018)
Edited volume:
Greenhow, C.,Sonnevend J., & Agur, C. (Eds.). (2016). Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Journal articles:
Sonnevend, J. (forthcoming, 2020). A virus as an Icon: The 2020 Pandemic in Images. American Journal of Cultural Sociology.
Sonnevend, J. & Katz, Y. (2020). Capturing Hearts: Charm, Personal Magnetism and The Iranian Nuclear Deal in the American and Israeli Press. Journalism Studies, 21 (11):1551–1570.
Sonnevend, J. & Kim, Y. (2020). An unlikely seducer: Kim Jong-un’s charm offensive from the PyeongChang Winter Olympics until the Trump-Kim summit. International Journal of Communication, 14, 1398–1420.
Sonnevend, J. (2019) Charm offensive: mediatized country image transformations in international relations. Information, Communication & Society, 22(5), 695-701.
Sonnevend, J. (2018). The lasting charm of Media Events. Media, Culture & Society 40(1), 122-126.
Sonnevend, J. (2018). Interruptions of time: The coverage of the missing Malaysian plane MH370 and the concept of “events” in media research. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 19(1), 75-92.
Sonnevend, J. (May 25, 2017). Our New Walls: The Rise of Separation Barriers in the Age of Globalization. E-International Relations (also published on Public Seminar).
Sonnevend, J. (2015). “Symbol of Hope for a World Without Walls”: The Fall of the Berlin Wall as a Global Iconic Event. Divinatio, 39-40, 223-233 (also translated into Bulgarian)
Sonnevend, J. (2013). Counterrevolutionary icons: The representation of the 1956 ‘counterrevolution’ in the Hungarian communist press. Journalism Studies, 14(3), 336-354.
Special issues in peer-reviewed journals:
Sonnevend, J. (2018). “Media Events Today”, Media, Culture & Society, 40(1), 110-113
Bodker, H., & Sonnevend, J. (2018). “The ShiftingTemporalities of Journalism”, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 19(1), 3-6
Peer-reviewed bibliography:
Sonnevend, J. (2017). Media Events. In Moy, P. (Ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Communication. New York: Oxford University Press.
Book chapters:
Sonnevend, J. (2020). The East in You Never Leaves. In Laczo, F. & Gabrijelcic, L. L. (Eds.) The Legacy of Division: East and West After 1989. Budapest: CEU Press. [also published on Eurozine and Public Seminar, and translated into Slovene]
Sonnevend, J. (2018). Facts (Almost) Never Win Over Myths. In Boczkowski, P. & Papacharissi, Z. (Eds.) Trump and the Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sonnevend, J. (2016). Event. In Peters, B. (Ed.), Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (pp. 109-118). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Balkin, J. M., & Sonnevend, J. (2016). The digital transformation of education. In Greenhow, C., Sonnevend J., & Agur, C. (Eds.), Education and social media: Toward a digital future (pp. 9-25). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sonnevend, J. (2016). More hope! Ceremonial media events are still important in the 21st century. In Fox, A. (Ed.), Global Perspectives on Media Events in Contemporary Society (pp. 132-141). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Media
"'The Big Clean Up': The 2020 Pandemic as a Representational Crisis," SSRC Items, September 27, 2020
"Mekkora Orbán vonzereje, és miért ilyen fontos, hogy van neki?" 24, August 13, 2019
"The East in You Never Leaves," Public Seminar, March 16, 2019
"Why We Need More Essays about Media," Public Seminar, March 6, 2018
"Megingott a liberális világrend, újra büszkén lehet falat építeni," 24, February 21, 2019
Cited in "'Trump and the Media': Work-in-Progress Dispatches from a Sinking Ship," Pop Matters, October 29, 2018
"'There Was No Berlin Wall, and It Never Fell'," Research Matters, July 5, 2017
"Our New Walls," Public Seminar, June 16, 2017
Contemporary Social Theory (Paris Spring 2021)