Daniel Dayan

Daniel Dayan (born January 28, 1943) is a social scientist born in Casablanca. He is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris and a fellow of the Marcel Mauss Institute (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales). Dayan studied at the Sorbonne, Stanford University, and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He holds degrees in Anthropology, Comparative literature, semiotics, film studies, and received a Ph. D in Aesthetics under the direction of Roland Barthes.

Dayan has been a lecturer, visiting professor and professor in media sociology and film at numerous universities including Pantheon-Assas University, Paris III- Sorbonne Nouvelle; Jerusalem; Tel Aviv; Stanford; Moscow-RGGU, Milano-IULM, Milano Statale; Liège; The University of Southern California; The Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris; The University of Oslo; The University of Geneva; The University of Pennsylvania.

In 1975–76, Dayan was invited to join The American Film Institute ‘s Research and publication committee. From 1999 to 2004 he was a member of the European Science Foundation Media Research program; In 2000 he was a resident of the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio. In 2001, he served as a foreign expert on media studies for the British “Research Assessment Exercise”. In 2005 he was invited as a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University, and as an Annenberg Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2006 he was the free speech visiting professor at the University of Bergen. In 2007- 2009, he was Hans Speier visiting professor at the New school for Social Research, New York.

Dayan has been a translator, a journal editor, and a media commentator, in print and on screen. He took part in two documentaries and contributed chapters to about seventy books or journals. His most recent books are La Terreur spectacle: Terrorisme et Télévision (Paris. INA De Boek, 2006 translated into Portuguese in 2009 ); Televisao,, Das Audiencias aos Publicos ( with Jose Carlos Abrantes, Lisboa, Livros Horizonte, 2006 ); Owning the Olympics. Narratives of the New China (with Monroe Price, N Y, Michigan University Press, 2008 ).

Dayan is co-author of the 1992 book Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History with American sociologist Elihu Katz. Daniel Schorr of National Public Radio hailed the book as "a feat of scholarship about a medium that tends to defy scholarship.". In the mid-1970s, inspired by Anwar Sadat’s peace-making initiative, Dayan and Katz began assembling a library of those live broadcasts of historic occasions that enthralled a whole nation, or the world. Support for this research came from the Markle Foundation and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California where Dayan and Katz taught at the time. Their 1992 book, Media Events is now in print in eight languages.

Dayan is currently a visiting professor in The New School's department of Political Science.