John Downey - Biography#

John Downey read Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University. He was a Senior Scholar at Gonville and Caius College and was the Graythorne Scholar and Beaumont Scholar at Jesus College. His PhD was about the Frankfurt School and John was a post-doc at the Graduate College for Communication Sciences at Siegen University in Germany.

John came to the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough in 2000. He was a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Williams College, Massachusetts in 2007 and was a Visiting Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2015 to 2017.

As well as receiving funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the European Commission, and the British Academy for his research, he has engaged in work for the BBC Board of Governors, the BBC Trust, the Office of Communication, the Electoral Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality, and the Guardian newspaper.

He is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College and sits on the ESRC’s Grants Assessment Panel B. He also reviews for the European Commission, the Canadian, Austrian, French, Polish and Irish Research Councils and the Volkswagen Stiftung.

John was Director of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough from 2016 to 2019. He was Site Director of the ESRC Midlands Graduate School Doctoral Training Partnership from 2016 to 20220.

He serves on the Executive Board of the UK’s Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA)

He is presently the President of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) (2021-2024), and before that he was the vice-President of the same organisation 2016-21.