Valerie Belair-Gagnon Named Executive Director of YLS Information Society Project

The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School has announced the appointment of Valerie Belair-Gagnon as its new executive director, effective June 1, 2014. Belair-Gagnon will assume her new responsibilities following the departure of Margot Kaminski ’10, who has served as executive director since 2011.

"Valerie is an amazingly talented scholar with deep institutional knowledge of contemporary media," said ISP faculty director Professor Jack Balkin. "I am delighted with her appointment; she will continue the Yale ISP's long-standing commitment to interdisciplinary research."

Belair-Gagnon is currently an Information Society Project postdoctoral fellow and Knight Law and Media Scholar. She earned a BA from McGill University, an MSc from Université de Montréal, and a PhD in sociology from City University London, where she also served as a visiting lecturer in media history and politics. Following graduation from the Université de Montréal, she worked as a communication specialist and project manager for an international forum. She tweets @vbelairgagnon.

Belair-Gagnon’s research focuses on emerging media, journalism, media law and policy, and media sociology. She has written on media, technologies and law for academic journals (including Journalism, Symbolic Interaction, Contexts, Global Media Journal) and popular media (including Nieman Journalism Lab, Columbia Journalism Review, Concurring Opinions, Online Journalism Review, Internet Policy Observatory, and the Huffington Post) drawing attention to the issues surrounding changes in technologies and media norms and practices.

The Information Society Project at Yale Law School was founded in 1997 to study the impact of the Internet and other information technologies on law and society. For more information, please visit the Information Society Project website.