Liam Mayes is an Assistant Teaching Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Program in Media Studies.

His research examines the relationship between media and politics by focusing on issues related to democratic degeneration, different forms of inequality, and the role social movements play in a democracy. His current book project, titled The Broken Hermeneutics of American Poverty, examines ethnographic accounts of poverty and argues that the emergence of the American affluent society in the twentieth century shifted the foundations on which poverty, inequality, and the divisions between rich and poor and between elites and non-elites are understood. His current research explores the rise of the long-form interview in right-wing American political media.

In the School of Humanities and Arts, he teaches core courses in the Media Studies program as well as more specialized courses on political media and the rise of AI. He also teaches courses in the Politics, Law and Social Thought program on a range of topics,  including American inequality, social and cultural theory, and social movements and protest.

He has organized over 50 national and international conferences and symposia, most recently developing and teaching interdisciplinary graduate courses in globalization and democratic theory at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary and at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.