Nancy Snow is an opinion writer, public speaker, author, and visiting distinguished professor of international relations. She is the lead author, along with Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, of the eighth edition of "Propaganda and Persuasion" (Sage, 2025), her 16th book, scheduled for release in August 2024. A Professor of Communications Emerita at California State University, Fullerton, she is a seasoned professional with a wealth of media and speaking experience in public diplomacy, strategic communications, and propaganda studies.
Snow received her Ph.D. in International Relations from American University’s School of International Service in Washington, D.C., ranked as a Top-10 IR program worldwide. At AU/SIS, she studied under Nicholas Onuf (constructivism), Dudley Weeks and Abdul Aziz Said (peace and conflict resolution studies), Gary Weaver, Mitchell Hammer, and Hamid Mowlana (intercultural and international communication). Beyond AU, her bookend scholarly mentors were George Gerbner and Herbert Schiller, along with an honorable mention from Howard Zinn, whose post-9/11 Orange County co-venture she reveals in “Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9/11.” Joseph Nye has supported her writing pursuits from Edward R. Murrow’s tenure at USIA ("Truth is the Best Propaganda") to gender and feminism in diplomacy (“On being a woman in public diplomacy” and “A Feminist Reformulation of Joseph Nye’s Question: What is Moral in Foreign Policy?“).
Her co-author and co-editor, the late Philip M. Taylor of the University of Leeds, is her academic muse.
Snow’s current book project is "Battleship Diplomat: The Enduring Soul of the Mighty Mo," for the Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, a general interest history of the USS Missouri in a public diplomacy context. The book is in tribute to her father, BB-63 Naval Ensign Victor Donald Snow, Sr. (Rice/MIT), who participated in the March-May 1946 Mediterranean Cruise of the Missouri to Turkey, Greece, Italy, Algiers and Morocco, a successful re-establishment of the U.S. Navy’s presence in what would soon become the Cold War home waters of the Sixth Fleet.
In 2024, Snow was a Fulbright Professor of Public Diplomacy at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Relations in Athens, Greece. She was also a postgraduate Fulbright scholar at the University of Freiburg, Germany, in the mid-1980s and a 2012 Fulbright Professor in American Culture and American Foreign Policy at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.
Snow’s affiliations with prestigious academic institutions and organizations are extensive. In AY 2022-2023, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor and Faculty Advisor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. She held the Walt Disney Endowed Chair in Global Media at Schwarzman College in 2020, and from 2016 to 2022, she had a special faculty appointment as Pax Mundi (‘Distinguished’) Professor of Public Diplomacy at Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, serving as the first full-time public diplomacy professor in Japan.
Snow is a foundational faculty member who helped advance public diplomacy in curriculum and practice at the top two flagship graduate programs, the University of Southern California Annenberg School and Syracuse University Newhouse School. Snow is an alumna of the highly selective Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) Program, where she was a specialist in cultural affairs and international exchange at the U.S. Information Agency, a refugee and migration analyst, and a Capitol Hill liaison at the U.S. Department of State.
Snow resides part-time in Tokyo, Japan. She is an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS), Temple University Japan, and a Senior Advisor at global PR firm Kreab’s Tokyo office. She is Strategic Communications Director at Japan's International Security Industry Council, a think tank on defense, security, and national interest issues. She is a faculty advisor to the OIST Foundation and has served on the editorial advising boards of the Journal of Public Diplomacy (South Korea), Public Diplomacy magazine (USC), and the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence journal, Defence Strategic Communications. In 2024, she was appointed Senior Fellow at the Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications.
In addition to her other faculty appointments, Snow was a visiting research professor at the Institute for Journalism, Media, and Communication Studies at Keio University, where she was also affiliated as a Social Science Research Council Abe Fellow. Her other visiting senior professorships include The Lauder School in Israel (Reichman University/IDC-Herzliya), Japan (Keio, Sophia), Malaysia (UiTM), and China (Tsinghua School of Journalism and Communication).
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