Professor William Dutton

William H. Dutton is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), where he was a Fulbright Scholar to Britain, was elected President of the University’s Faculty Senate, and taught until 2002, when he became the first Professor of Internet Studies at the University of Oxford.

At Oxford, Bill was founding director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and a Fellow of Balliol College. He left Oxford in 2014 to become the Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at MSU, where he served as Director of the Quello Center, until returning to Oxford as an Oxford Martin Fellow to support research for the GCSCC.

He has recently edited the Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (OUP 2013), four volumes on Politics and the Internet (Routledge 2014), and a reader entitled Society and the Internet, with Mark Graham (OUP 2014), with a 2nd revised edition (OUP 2019), and edited A Research Agenda for Digital Politics (Elgar 2020). His book entitled Society on the Line (OUP 1999) has been influential to social sciences of the Internet. His most recent book is The Fifth Estate: The Power Shift of the Digital Age is (OUP 2023).