Herman Wasserman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Journalism at Stellenbosch University. He holds a doctorate from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and worked as a journalist before starting an academic career. He has published widely on media in post-apartheid South Africa. His books include the monographs The Ethics of Engagement: Media, Conflict and Democracy in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2020); Media, Geopolitics, and Power (University of Illinois Press, 2018), Tabloid Journalism in South Africa (Indiana University Press, 2010) and several edited collections, the latest of which is Disinformation in the Global South (2022, co-edited with Dani Madrid-Morales). He is editor-in-chief of the journals the Annals of the International Communication Association and African Journalism Studies and sits on the editorial board of several other scholarly journals. Wasserman holds a B1 rating from the South African National Research Foundation, is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and an elected member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (Assaf).
Herman Wasserman has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, the Humboldt Foundation's Georg Foster Research Prize, the Stals Prize from the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns and the International Neva Award for Journalism Theory from St Petersburg State University. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and an elected member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa.