Professor Phil Taylor, Professor of International Communications, one of the field's outstanding scholars and a founding member of the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, died in December 2010.
Phil graduated from Leeds with a First in History in 1975 followed, in 1978, by a PhD. In the same year, he was appointed as Lecturer in the School of History and was subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1987. Phil was seconded as Deputy Director to the Institute of Communications Studies in 1990, this position becoming permanent in 1993, along with his promotion to Reader. In 1998 he was appointed to a Chair of International Communications and was Head of the Institute until 2002.
Phil was an internationally renowned scholar of international communications and propaganda, a charismatic and popular teacher, and an excellent colleague.
From 1995, Phil maintained a website to serve as a key resource for matters relating to:
- International and Strategic Communications
- Propaganda and the global 'war' on terror
- Military-Media Relations
- Public Diplomacy
- Psychological Operations, Information Warfare & Information Operations
- War Reporting
In 2014, the School of Media and Communication archived the contents of that site at media.leeds.ac.uk/papers using httrack. In 2019, the School of Media and Communication website was redeveloped in a new system and this archive went offline. On 16th September 2020, the site was placed here (in the gh-pages branch) to facilitate the archiving of the site in the UK Web Archive