Johanna Blakley is deputy director of the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, where she conducts research on such topics as global entertainment, cultural diplomacy, celebrity culture, digital media, and intellectual property law. Much of her work addresses the intersection between entertainment and politics. Recently she conducted two nationwide polls with Zogby International on the relationship between political ideology and entertainment preferences. Blakley has guided more than forty manuscripts though the publication process at the Lear Center, including Ready to Share: Fashion & the Ownership of Creativity; Artists, Technology & the Ownership of Creative Content and Warner’s War: Propaganda, Politics & Pop Culture in Wartime Hollywood. She received a PhD in English from UC Santa Barbara, where she taught courses on popular culture and twentieth-century literature. Blakley has held a variety of positions in the high-tech industry, including Web producer and digital archivist at Vivendi-Universal Games. She is on the board of directors for Les Figues Press, a venue for literary experimentation.