Kathryn Montalbano is an Assistant Professor of Media Law and Ethics and Program Coordinator of the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center at the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Media. She earned her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism/Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and her B.A. in English (with a minor in sociology) from Haverford College in 2009.

Montalbano is a historian of communications who specializes in media law, religion and media, and surveillance studies. Her research examines how communication law and policy shapes speech, press, assembly, and religious expression in the United States since the nineteenth century.

Five themes shape her scholarship: (1) how media history can inform contemporary debates in media law and policy, (2) contemporary content moderation and platform policies, (3) the intersection of media law and sports law, (4) the sociology of news, and (5) religion, media, and politics. Her first book compares how United States government agencies in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries monitored and negotiated the identities of three distinctive religious groups within cultural and legal frameworks deeply rooted in Protestant hegemony.

For more information, please see: https://kathrynmontalbano.com/