About the author
Dr Sarah Pedersen is a Reader at the Department of Communication, Marketing and Media at The Robert Gordon University (RGU), Aberdeen, Scotland. She is also a member of the Aberdeen Business School’s Research Institute for Management, Governance and Society.
Having previously worked as an editor in educational and academic publishing in Cambridge, she joined RGU in 1996 as a Lecturer in Publishing Studies. Her PhD investigated women’s use of letters to the editor in Aberdeen daily newspapers 1900–18, and she has presented conference papers and published widely on this topic.
In recent years her interest in women’s use of the media has moved to focus on computer-mediated communication. In particular, she has investigated women’s use of blogging and the practices and motivations of British bloggers. In 2006–7 she was awarded an AHRC Research Leave Grant to research differences and similarities in practices and motivation between British and American bloggers. Her research has investigated the impact of the second wave of blogging on the blogosphere outside the United States and has pinpointed some important differences between the dominant American model and later blogging development elsewhere in the world. She is currently working on a research project focused on parents’ use of the Internet with Dr Janet Smithson of Exeter University.
She served as Chair of the UK Association for Publishing Education (UK APE) from 2006 to 2010 and is a member of the advisory board for the International Conference on the Book and the International Journal of the Book and the AHRC Peer Review College.
She lives in a wooden house in Aberdeenshire with her husband and two sons where she surfs the Internet a lot.