Philip N. Howard (B.A. Toronto, M.Sc. London School of Economics, Ph.D. Northwestern) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His current research and teaching interests include the role of new information technologies in the political communication systems of advanced democracies and the role of new information technologies in the social development of poor countries. He is working on a new book, The Internet and Islam:  Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy for Oxford University Press.  He is the author of New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), which considers how information technology is used by political elites to structure public opinion and political culture in the United States. The book was awarded the 2007 CITASA Best Book prize from the American Sociological Association and the 2008 Best Book prize from the International Communication Association. He has coedited, with Steve Jones, Society Online: The Internet in Context (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2004) and, with Andrew Chadwick, the Handbook of Internet Politics (London: Routledge, 2008). He is the author of numerous journal articles examining the role of new information and communication technologies in politics and social development, including pieces in the American Behavioral Scientist, the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and New Media & Society. He has worked on several National Science Foundation projects, serving on the advisory board of the Survey2000 and Survey2001 Projects, comanaging a project about information and communication technologies in Central Asia and directing the World Information Access Project. Howard has been a consultant to the Canadian International Development Agency and has held fellowships at the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington D.C., the Stanhope Centre for Communications Policy Research in London, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto.