Thomas J Billard Email & Phone Number

TJ Billard is an Associate Professor and William T. Grant Scholar in the School of Communication and, by courtesy, the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University, where they are affiliated with the Institute for Policy Research and the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. Outside of Northwestern, they are the founding Executive Director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies in Chicago—the leading academic organization dedicated to scholarship on the social, cultural, and political conditions of transgender life—and Editor-in-Chief of the Center’s flagship journal, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Billard’s research spans political communication, the sociology of social movements, and transgender studies, with a primary focus on the relationship between media and transgender politics in the United States and United Kingdom.Billard is the author of Voices for Transgender Equality: Making Change in the Networked Public Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2024). The book offers an insider’s view into transgender activism during the first two years of the Trump administration, during which trans people were thrust onto the center stage of US politics. Drawing on extensive on-the-ground observation at the National Center for Transgender Equality, Voices for Transgender Equality shows how these activists developed an unlikely blend of online and offline strategies to saturate a diverse ecology of national news outlets, local and community media outlets across the country, and both public and private conversations across multiple social media platforms with voices in support of their cause. Billard is also co-editor (with Silvio Waisbord) of Public Scholarship in Communication Studies (University of Illinois Press, 2024). Taking the position that “public scholarship” should not prioritize publicity for scholars and their ideas, but rather should prioritize serving the public good in ways that go beyond conventional scholarly work, the volume brings together an all-star cast of public scholars to offer both critical meditations on the role and importance of public scholarship in communication studies’ various subfields and “how-to” guides for enacting public scholarship.Billard’s current research project, tentatively titled Cisinformed: Disinformation and the Media War on Transgender Rights, focuses on the central role of misinformation in anti-transgender movements’ political strategies in both the US and UK, why these strategies work, and what can be done to curb misinformation’s political influence.

Listed skills include Strategic Communications, Social Media, Research, Public Relations, and 20 others.