Hoover, Stewart M.

Stewart Mark Hoover (born April 14, 1951) is a Professor of Media Studies and Professor Adjoint of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the founder and director of the Center for Media, Religion and Culture. His research interest centers on media audience and reception studies rooted in cultural studies, anthropology and qualitative sociology. He is known for his work on media and religion, particularly in the phenomenon of televangelism, and later in religion journalism. His most recent work involves household-level studies of media audience practices of meaning-making and identity. Supported by a series of grants from the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation, this work investigates the extent to which the media sphere as a whole and the various media which comprise it constitute a central site of meaning practice (including religious meaning practice) in contemporary domestic and global life. Through the center he directs, he has also become influential in scholarly discourses about the public understanding and role of religion globally and the ways those are rooted in its mediation.