Dr. Veenstra earned his PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught at Southern Illinois University Carbondale for ten years before joining the faculty at FAU. His research builds on the social psychological tradition in mass communication, with a focus on how political and other social identities influence the ways people seek and interpret news information. Dr. Veenstra has a professional background in web development, and much of his research deals with how the digital environment has made all kinds of information more abundant and available.

Areas of expertise: political communication, media effects, online communities, social identity, cognitive bias

Recent Publications:

"The Extremists Across the Aisle: Influences of Political Identity and Political Television on Evaluations of Presidential Candidate Extremity" in Atlantic Journal of Communication.

"Social Identities and the Illinois Pension Problem: Roles of Politics, Geography, and Media" in Illinois Municipal Policy Journal, with Benjamin A. Lyons, Zachary S. Sapienza and Cheeyoun Stephanie Kang.

"The Transmission Model of Communication: Toward a Multidisciplinary Explication" in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, with Zachary S. Sapienza, Kęstas Kirtiklis and Steve Giannino.