Liam Mayes is Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Program in Media Studies at Rice University. He writes about media and politics, particularly inequality, protest, and the way political ideas travel through popular forms.
His current research looks at right-wing political media and polarization through the long-form interview as a genre. He is also writing a book, The Broken Hermeneutics of American Poverty, on how postwar American affluence transformed the ways Americans understand, classify, and experience poverty. Related work includes an article on protest tactics in Canada’s 2022 Freedom Convoy and an essay on J.D. Vance’s reception across the political spectrum, published in Ácoma.
At Rice, he teaches core courses in Media Studies alongside courses on American political media, democracy and AI, protest, and inequality, including for the Program in Politics, Law and Social Thought. He comments regularly on AI and political media for outlets including NBC News, the Houston Chronicle, KHOU, and KVUE.
Since 2021, he has co-directed the Charles Taylor Summer Institute on Democratic Agendas, a program for advanced graduate students from around the world, formerly at Central European University in Budapest and now based at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade, Serbia. He is also Assistant Director of the Center for Transcultural Studies and has organized more than 50 national and international conferences and symposia. His multidisciplinary artwork has been exhibited in the United States and Germany.
Before Rice, he taught at Tulane University. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Northwestern University, where he received the Best Dissertation Award and the inaugural Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. He also holds an MA and BA from McGill University.