Author Archives: mliseblad

In A League of Their Own: AEJMC History Division Mini-Profiles – Elizabeth Atwood, Nathaniel Frederick II and Mark Neuzil

By Perry Parks, Membership Co-Chair, Michigan State University, parksp@msu.edu

Elizabeth Atwood

Where you work: Hood College, Frederick, MD (associate professor)

Where you got your Ph.D.: University of Maryland

Current favorite class: Introduction to Media Writing (I enjoy seeing students learn a new form of writing and gain appreciation for how journalists work.)

Current research project: I have just completed work on the biography of Marguerite Harrison, a Baltimore Sun reporter who was a spy for the Military Intelligence Division in the early 1920s. The book, The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison, America’s First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent, will be published by Naval Institute Press in September.

Fun fact about yourself: I met my husband in Moscow when the Baltimore Sun sent its co-ed softball team to Russia in 1990 to teach Russian journalists how to play softball. That anecdote shows how much money newspapers used to have and how naive we were as we watched the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Engaging Graduate Students in Meaningful Ways, Improving Recruitment

By Graduate Student Co-Liaisons Bailey Dick, Ohio University, bd764808@ohio.edu, and Brandon Storlie, University of Wisconsin, bstorlie@wisc.edu

As the graduate student co-liaisons, the largest challenges we have are engaging student members in a meaningful way and division recruitment. Graduate students are extremely busy, juggling many different tasks. Some balance taking courses with conducting research while also teaching as instructors of record. As students progress in their coursework, they prepare for and take their comprehensive exams, start working on their dissertations and navigate the job market. Graduate students tend to spread themselves thin, trying to accumulate as many lines on the CV as possible. Sometimes a commitment beyond basic membership simply isn’t feasible. These last couple of months, the added stressor has been trying to balance everything during a pandemic.

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Liseblad, Parks Honored for Exceptional Service

Madeleine Liseblad and Perry Parks will be recognized during the History Division’s virtual Awards Gala for Exceptional Service to the History Division.

This new honor from the chair and vice chair recognizes these junior scholars for their behind-the-scenes commitment to advance the importance of journalism history through public relations initiatives.

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AEJMC History Division Announces Book Award Winner

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected Dr. Will Slauter as the winner of its Book Award honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2019.

The author of Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford University Press), Slauter is an associate professor at Université de Paris and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and taught at Columbia University and Florida State University before relocating to France in 2010.

The runner-up for this year’s Book Award is Dr. Aimee Edmondson, author of In Sullivan’s Shadow: The Use and Abuse of Libel Law During the Long Civil Rights Struggle (University of Massachusetts Press). An associate professor and director of graduate studies at Ohio University, Edmondson earned her Ph.D. in Journalism at the University of Missouri. She teaches courses in media law; computer-assisted reporting; and race, class, and gender in the media.

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Award Call: 2020 Outstanding Thesis

The History Division is accepting nominations for the 2020 outstanding master’s thesis in journalism and mass communications history.

Any master’s thesis on a topic in mass communication history will be considered, regardless of research method. Submissions must be in English. The thesis must have been submitted, defended, and filed in final form to the author’s degree-granting university between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2020. Membership in the AEJMC History Division is not required to submit.

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Katie Day Good Wins 36th Annual Covert Award

The 36th annual Covert Award in Mass Communication History is awarded to Katie Day Good, assistant professor of strategic communication, Department of Media, Journalism and Film, and affiliate faculty, American Studies, at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.

Good won for her article “Sight-Seeing in School: Visual Technology, Virtual Experience, and World Citizenship in American Education, 1900–1930.” Technology and Culture, 60, no. 1 (2019): 98-131.

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Zboray and Zboray Win Sweeney Award

Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray have won the third annual Michael S. Sweeney Award for their article, “Recovering Disabled Veterans in Civil War Newspapers: Creating Heroic Disability.”

Named for former Journalism History editor Mike Sweeney, the award recognizes the outstanding article published in the previous volume of the scholarly journal Journalism History.

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Book Q&A with Amber Roessner

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Dr. Amber Roessner is an associate professor of journalism and electronic media in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville. She recently wrote Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign.

Q: Describe the focus of your book.

A: This book tells the story of a transformative moment in American politics and journalism by examining the rise of Jimmy Carter, Time’s 1976 “miracle” man, through a representational and relational analysis of archival documents, media texts, and memory texts surrounding the negotiation of political images by presidential aspirants, campaign consultants, frontline reporters, and various publics involved in the bicentennial campaign. Though many cultural observers dismissed Carter’s campaign and presidency as the final chapter of Watergate, this book reveals that his “miraculous” rise in the bicentennial campaign signaled a new chapter in American politics and journalism that still reverberates today.

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Mayfield Named Thesis Award Winner

Mark Mayfield has won the Hazel Dicken-Garcia Award for his thesis, “At Home: Shelter Magazines and the American Life, 1890 to 1930.” Mayfield completed his research at the University of Alabama under the direction of Chris Roberts and Dianne Bragg.

Presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the Dicken-Garcia Award recognizes the outstanding thesis in journalism or mass communication history completed during the previous calendar year.

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Beasley Named History Division’s First Senior Scholar Winner

The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication is pleased to announce that Maurine Beasley is the first winner of the division’s Senior Scholar Award.

“Maurine Beasley has created not only a strong record of historical scholarship, but a legacy. Selected from a competitive field of nominations, she stands out as the clear choice to be the inaugural recipient of the Donald Shaw Senior Scholar Award,” the judges’ comments said. “She is a tireless scholar in pursuit of historical truth. More than that, she has helped produce multiple generations of scholars, both by inspiring them with her published work and by providing personal mentorship.”

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