Books

Julia Sonnevend:
Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics
Princeton University Press, 2024
Paperback edition, March 3, 2026

Profiles
How Powerful Is Political Charm? (The New Yorker, September 24, 2024); Julia Sonnevend, NSSR Faculty, Researches How Politicians Wield Charm (The New School News, October 24, 2024).

Selected media interviews and reviews
The Atlantic, BBC Newshour, BBC World Service, Times Literary Supplement, KERA’s Think (NPR/PBS), Bloomberg News, Times Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Teen Vogue, The Bunker Podcast, The Review of Democracy, Texas Public Radio (The Source), USA Today, Infinite Loops, Hold After Hours, Princeton Ideas, Public Seminar, Public Sphere, Kirkus Reviews, Choice.

Academic reviews
Social Forces; International Journal of Communication; Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

Op-eds
The Power of Tim Walz’s Joyful Charm (Time Magazine, August 8, 2024); The VP Debate Shows How Performance Shapes Our Democracy (Time Magazine, October 2, 2024).

Translation
Hungarian (Open Books, October 2024).

Journal articles

Sonnevend, J., Lin, F., & Zhi, P. (2025). The power of charm: Understanding the influence of magnetic leadership – A dialogue with Julia Sonnevend. Communication and the Public, 10(2), 73–80.

Pooley, J., & Sonnevend, J. (2025). A forum for books. Journal of Communication, 75(1), 79–80.

Sumiala, J., Harju, A. A., & Sonnevend, J. (2025). Goodnight Ma’am: The Queen’s death as a media event and the contestation of legacies in live participation. Media, Culture & Society, 47(4), 733–752.

Sonnevend, J. (2024) Populist Iconicity: The Contradictions of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as a Political Celebrity. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 63 no. 2, 2024, p. 169-175.

Sonnevend, J., & Kövesdi, V. (2024; first published online June 14, 2023). More Than Just a Strongman: The
Strategic Construction of Viktor Orbán’s Charismatic Authority on
Facebook. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 29(4), 891–918.

Sonnevend, J. & Steiert, O. (2024; first published online December 8, 2022). The Power of Predictability: How Angela Merkel Constructed Her Authenticity on Instagram. New Media & Society, 26(10), 5719–5741.

Sonnevend, J. (2020). A virus as an Icon: The 2020 Pandemic in Images. American Journal of Cultural Sociology. 12, 451-461.

Sonnevend, J. & Katz, Y. (2020). Capturing Hearts: Charm, Personal Magnetism and The Iranian Nuclear Deal in the American and Israeli Press. Journalism Studies, 21 (11):1551–1570.

Sonnevend, J. & Kim, Y. (2020). An unlikely seducer: Kim Jong-un’s charm offensive from the PyeongChang Winter Olympics until the Trump-Kim summit. International Journal of Communication, 14, 1398–1420.

Sonnevend, J. (2019) Charm offensive: mediatized country image transformations in international relations. Information, Communication & Society, 22(5), 695-701.

Sonnevend, J. (2018). The lasting charm of Media Events. Media, Culture & Society 40(1), 122-126.

Sonnevend, J. (2018).  Interruptions of time: The coverage of the missing Malaysian plane MH370 and the concept of “events” in media research. Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 19(1), 75-92.

Sonnevend, J. (May 25, 2017). Our New Walls: The Rise of Separation Barriers in the Age of Globalization. E-International Relations (also published on Public Seminar).

Sonnevend, J. (2015). “Symbol of Hope for a World Without Walls”: The Fall of the Berlin Wall as a Global Iconic Event. Divinatio, 39-40, 223-233 (also translated into Bulgarian)

Sonnevend, J. (2013). Counterrevolutionary icons: The representation of the 1956 ‘counterrevolution’ in the Hungarian communist press. Journalism Studies, 14(3), 336-354.

Special issues in
peer-reviewed journals

Sonnevend, J. (2018). “Media Events Today”, Media, Culture & Society, 40(1), 110-113

Bodker, H. & Sonnevend, J. (2018). “The Shifting Temporalities of Journalism”, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, 19(1), 3-6

Peer-reviewed bibliography

Sonnevend, J. (2017). Media Events. In Moy, P. (Ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Communication. New York: Oxford University Press.

Book chapters

Sonnevend, J. & Steiert, O. (2022) “Seeing a Crisis Through Media:
Narrating the Coronavirus Pandemic”, In J. Witte, S. Pickard, & M. Welker (Eds), The Impact of the Media on Character Formation, Ethical Education, and the Communication of Values in Late Modern Pluralistic Societies. (pp. 137-150). Evangelische Verlangsanstalt: University of Heidelberg.

Sonnevend, J. (2020). The East in You Never Leaves. In Laczo, F. & Gabrijelcic, L. L. (Eds.) The Legacy of Division: East and West After 1989. Budapest: CEU Press. [also published on Eurozine and Public Seminar, and translated into Slovene]

Sonnevend, J. (2018). Facts (Almost) Never Win Over Myths. In Boczkowski, P. & Papacharissi, Z. (Eds.) Trump and the Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sonnevend, J. (2016). Event. In Peters, B. (Ed.), Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (pp. 109-118). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sonnevend, J. (2016). More hope! Ceremonial media events are still important in the 21st century. In Fox, A. (Ed.), Global Perspectives on Media Events in Contemporary Society (pp. 132-141). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Balkin, J. M., & Sonnevend, J. (2016). The digital transformation of education. In Greenhow, C., Sonnevend J., & Agur, C. (Eds.), Education and social media: Toward a digital future (pp. 9-25). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sonnevend, J. (2013). Iconoclash, or how to become “friends of interpretable objects?” Read Bruno Latour! In J. Elkins, K. McGuire, M. Burns, A. Chester, & J. Kuennen (Eds.), Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (pp. 131-33). New York, London: Routledge.

Sonnevend, J. (2012). Iconic rituals: Towards a social theory of encountering images. In J. C. Alexander, D. Bartmanski & B. Giesen (Eds.), Iconic power: Materiality and meaning in social life (pp. 219-233). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Selected essays, reviews, and media

Sonnevend, J. (April 13, 2026). Viktor Orbán’s Loss in Hungary Shows How a Strongman Can Be Defeated. MS NOW.

Sonnevend, J. (March 3, 2026). Why Do We Still Love Goffman? Peter Lunt Offers Some Answers. Review of Peter Lunt’s Goffman and the Media. Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research.

Sonnevend, J. (May 8, 2025). The Administrative State, Its Democratic Deficits, and How to Fix Them in Comparative Historical Perspective. In conversation with Kim Lane Scheppele, Jim Miller, and Mark W. Frazier. Public Seminar.

Sonnevend, J. (October 2, 2024). The VP Debate Shows How Performance Shapes Our Democracy. Time Magazine.

The Power of Tim Walz’s Joyful Charm. Time Magazine, August 8, 2024

„‚The Big Clean Up‘: The 2020 Pandemic as a Representational Crisis,“ SSRC Items, September 27, 2020

„Mekkora Orbán vonzereje, és miért ilyen fontos, hogy van neki?“ 24, August 13, 2019

„The East in You Never Leaves,“ Public Seminar, March 16, 2019

„Why We Need More Essays about Media,“ Public Seminar, March 6, 2018

„Megingott a liberális világrend, újra büszkén lehet falat építeni,“ 24, February 21, 2019

Cited in „‚Trump and the Media‘: Work-in-Progress Dispatches from a Sinking Ship,“ Pop Matters, October 29, 2018

„‚There Was No Berlin Wall, and It Never Fell‘,“ Research Matters, July 5, 2017

„Our New Walls,“ Public Seminar, June 16, 2017