Dannagal Young

Keynote Speaker

Author and Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Delaware and Director of the University’s Center for Political Communication

Young holds a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. She has published more than 70 academic articles and book chapters on the content, psychology, and effects of political information, satire, and misinformation. Young’s latest book, “Wrong: How Media, Politics, and Identity Drive our Appetite for Misinformation” (JHU Press, 2023), explores the demand side of misinformation—that is, why we are attracted to falsehoods. Her first book, “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the U.S.” (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines satire and outrage as the logical extensions of the respective psychological profiles of liberals and conservatives and received the 2021 Roderick Hart Book Award from the National Communication Association’s Political Communication division.

Young’s 2020 TED Talk explaining how our psychology shapes our politics and how media exploit these relationships has more than 2 million views. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and op-eds in outlets including Vox.com, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Young has appeared on CNN, PBS News Hour, ABC News, NPR, and various national and international podcasts. As of 2024, her research has been cited in more than 120 popular press publications.

Young’s popular University of Delaware course “Propaganda and Persuasion” was released by The Great Courses in 2023, and she received the university’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014. In 2021, 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 at The George Washington University in recognition of her public-facing work.

Young is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center and the University of Arizona’s National Institute for Civil Discourse, where she co-edited “A Crisis of Civility: Political Discourse and its Discontents” (Routledge, 2018). She also is an improvisational comedian, performing with ComedySportz Philadelphia since 1999.