About

William Lafi Youmans is a visiting associate professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is broadly interested in questions of transnationalism, power and communication, with his primary research interests focusing on global news, media industries, technology, law, and politics. His other areas of research interest include media law, Middle East politics, and Arab American studies.

Youmans is the author of Unlikely Audience: Al Jazeera's Struggle in America (Oxford UP), which examines Al Jazeera’s efforts to gain a share of the news market in the United States. He has been quoted in articles in Salon, Washington Post, Newsweek, Variety, and The New York Times, among others. He was a guest on radio and television programs, such as NPR, Headline News, Al Jazeera English, and ARD. He has published in the Washington Post, Middle East Report, and Nieman Journalism Lab.

His paper on Arab Detroit won the Best Paper Award in the International Communication Section of the International Studies Association. It was later published in The Communication Review.

Youmans presented at academic conferences, including the annual gatherings of the Middle East Studies Association, the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, the International Studies Association, and the American Sociological Association.

He is currently working on two long-term projects. The first is a documentary film about Alex Odeh, a Palestinian American activist who was assassinated in Orange County, CA, in 1985. The crime is unsolved and still haunts the local community to this day. The second is a major video archive he is building of Arab American TV, a program that ran out of Los Angeles from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Youmans obtained his BA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He also holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley.