Key Faculty & Courses
The 2023-2026 JMCE at UNC includes 16 key staff members. These faculty serve in three different departments–Environmental Science, Journalism, and German Languages and Literatures. Together, the Key Staff bring a wealth of experience and varied perspectives, which will strengthen the dialogue and bring a broader and more diverse audience to the discussion table. Key Staff Members have designed courses on key issues in the EU surrounding diversity, energy, and media. See below for current and future course offerings and faculty bios.

Tori Ekstrand
Victoria “Tori” Smith Ekstrand has been a media law and free expression scholar for more than two decades. Before that, she worked as a senior executive for The Associated Press at its headquarters in New York City. She is currently serving a three-year term at the UNC Graduate School as the Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education, where she leads UNC’s premier doctoral fellows program and its annual Royster Global conference with UNC’s strategic global partners. She has published articles in top communications journals and law reviews, including Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal and Communication Law & Policy. Along with Caitlin Carlson and Erin Coyle, she is the new lead editor for The Law of Journalism and Mass Communication, one of top media law texts for schools of media and journalism in the U.S., and the first media law textbook with all female scholars. The eighth edition will be published in 2023.

Noah Kittner
Noah Kittner studies energy systems at multiple scales, from regional and international power grids to community-owned micro-grids and household energy dynamics. Kittner’s current work examines the relationship between energy systems, low-carbon development, and human health. Ongoing projects include energy system planning in Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, the emissions and health effects of coal-fired power plants in Kosovo, and battery assessment for electric vehicle and energy storage applications. Kittner holds a PhD in Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley where he studied energy systems engineering, science, and policy. His work with the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab (RAEL) appears in leading journals ranging from Nature Energy to Environmental Science and Technology and Ecological Economics. Previously, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the Joint Graduate School of Energy and Environment in Bangkok, Thailand and has worked extensively on a Thai Solar PV Roadmap project with colleagues at Chulalongkorn University. He received his BS in Environmental Science (highest honors) with a dual minor in Mathematics and Urban Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Priscilla Layne
Priscilla Layne is Associate Professor of German, Adjunct Associate Professor of African, African American and Diaspora Studies, and affiliated with the Global Cinema Studies Program. She has guest lectured at Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen and at Universität Bremen. Layne focuses on sci-fi, cinema, and Black culture in Germany and Europe. Her first book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She is also the co-editor of the volume Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History and Art (2008). She is working on a monograph, Out of this World: Afro-German Afrofuturism. She held a Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin in fall 2018. She has published articles on German film, literature, translation and music in German Studies Review, the Women in German Yearbook and Colloquia Germanica.