The Hazel Dicken-Garcia Outstanding Master’s Thesis in Journalism and Mass Communication History Award recognizes the outstanding mass communication history thesis completed in the prior calendar year.

Dicken-Garcia taught in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis for 30 years.

Her second and best-known book, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America, won the Frank Luther Mott Kappa Tau Alpha research award in 1989. She received the American Journalism Historians Association’s Kobre Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006.

Known for her dedication to education, this award continues her passion for helping graduate students.

Current recipient
2023 No recipient

Past recipients
2022 No recipient

2021 Claire Rounkles, Ohio University,  “The Shame of the Buckeye State: Journalistic Complacency in Episodic Lynching in Ohio from 1872 to 1932.” Advisers: Aimee Edmondson and Michael Sweeney

2020 Mark Mayfield, “At Home: Shelter Magazines and the American Life, 1890 to 1930.” Advisers: Chris Roberts and Dianne Bragg, Alabama 

2019 Laura Purcell, “Getting People to Wish What They Need: How the United States Government Used Public Relations Strategies to Communicate Food Policy during World War II, 1941-1945.” Adviser: Cayce Myers, Virginia Tech University