Karen Ross researches and teaches media, gender and political communication, writes about gender, politics, news and representation and is Professor of  Gender and Media in the School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University. She has held positions as Visiting Professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Massey University (2007-2011) and the Centre for Advancement of Women in Politics at Queens University Belfast (2001-2004). She was a Distinguished Visitor at Massey University in 2018.

Karen’s work looks at the relationships between gender and media, women/politics/media and media/publics. She has authored and co-authored numerous books, edited collections, journal articles and other publications – see her CV including a list of publications here.  Earlier research work included several studies for public and private broadcasters, focused on both audiences and representation which included the development of multimedia training materials – see CV. She has also developed training materials relating to equality and diversity issues in higher education, as well as a series of short films on radical women in Liverpool which are currently being exhibited at the Museum of Liverpool. In 2011, she worked with the New Zealand Labour Party and produced a series of short films highlighting election campaign contexts – see multimedia link. In 2013 she completed the first significant analysis of gender, decision-making and representation in major media houses across the EU, funded by the European Institute for Gender Research, see here for published report. She has been the European Coordinator of the Global Media Monitoring Project since 2009 and coordinated the Western European data collection for GMMP 2015. Most recently (2017-2019) she led a European consortium on an EU-funded project looking at advancing gender equality in the media – see here.

Karen currently supervises a number of creative and wonderful PhD students.  Her favourite colour is black, her favourite food is Lindor butterscotch truffles and her favourite people are her fab twin sister, Elizabeth, her equally wonderful daughters Josie and Liz and her dog, Lily.