Shawn Powers is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University and an Associate Director at the Center on International Media Education. Dr. Powers has previously served as a research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Oxford University's Program in Comparative Media and Law and at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Global Communication Studies. He received his Ph.D from USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and specializes in the geopolitics of information and information technologies. Shawn's research interests include mass media and society, new and social media technologies, diasporic communities, globalization and traditional and public diplomacy. He has conducted field research in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern and Western Europe and North America.

Shawn's work has been published in several journals, including: Media, War & Conflict, Global Media & Communication, Ethnopolitics and Media Development. In 2007, Shawn was the co-recipient of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to study global news broadcasters and in 2008 Shawn helped design and managed CPD's evaluation of Alhurra, the US-supported international broadcaster in the Middle East. He's also co-led projects for the World Bank (on media development) and Deutsche Welle (on news framing). Shawn is currently working on two book projects: From Micro-state to Network State: The Rise of Qatar, and The Real CyberWar: The Political Economy of the Internet.