Professor William H. Dutton

William H. Dutton is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California (USC), where he was a Fulbright Scholar to Britain and directed the UK’s Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PIC). He was elected President of USC's Faculty Senate, and taught until 2002, when he became the first Professor of Internet Studies at the University of Oxford.

At Oxford, Bill was founding director of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and a Fellow of Balliol College. He left Oxford in 2014, accepting a position as the Quello Professor of Media and Information Policy in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, where he served as Director of the Quello Center. He returned to Oxford as an Oxford Martin and OII Fellow to support research for the GCSCC.

Professor Dutton's most recent book, The Fifth Estate (OUP 2023) focuses on the power shift of the digital age and explains how media regulation and cybersecurity need to be joined on shaping the future of regulating information and communication technologies, such as the internet and social media. Previously he has edited the Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (OUP 2013), four volumes on Politics and the Internet (Routledge 2014), two editions of a reader entitled Society and the Internet, with Mark Graham (OUP 2014 and OUP 2019), and an edited volume, entitled A Research Agenda for Digital Politics (Elgar 2020). His book entitled Society on the Line (OUP 1999) has been particularly influential to social sciences of the Internet.