Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce is an associate professor focused on global journalism, media effects and democracy at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University. Her studies look at the evolution of journalism in an interconnected world, focusing on transnational news and their effects, as well as the changing roles of journalists in comparative, cross national analyses.
Her work specializes in Latin America, which in the past few decades has undergone a particularly relevant transformation within the journalism landscape amidst a tumultuous context of insecure democracies. She received her undergraduate degree in Social Communication/Journalism from Pontifícia Universidade Católica, in São Paulo, Brazil. In her native Brazil, she worked as an analyst for two public opinion research companies and as a journalist for two digital native news organizations. She received her Masters and Doctorate degrees from the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.
She has published two books that were co-authored with leading experts in global media: From Telenovelas to Netflix: Transnational, Transverse Television in Latin America (2021) and The evolution of television: An analysis of ten years of TGI Latin America (2004-2014) (2016). Her work has been published at top peer-reviewed journals, such as Journalism, Journalism Practice and International Communication Gazette. She received the recent Latino/Latin American Communication Research Award at AEJMC 2018 for her study titled Seeking Transnational, Entrepreneurial News from Latin America: An Audience Analysis.