Six historians will receive funding this spring to advance diverse perspectives in media history.
The microgrant initiative was a joint collaboration between American Journalism/American Journalism Historians Association and Journalism History/AEJMC History Division. Journalism History Publications Chairwoman Teri Finneman said the goal was to provide direct support to increase diversity research in the journals.
“The number of applications that we received exceeded expectations, prompting us to award more projects than initially planned,” Finneman said. “It’s truly wonderful to see how many great ideas there are and the direction of journalism history research.”
The Covert Award recognizes the author of the best mass communication history article or essay published in the previous year. Book chapters in edited collections published in the previous year are also eligible. The AEJMC History Division has presented the award annually since 1985.
Betto van Waarden is the winner of the 2023 Tom Reilly Award.
His article, “The Many Faces of Performative Politics: Satires of Statesman Bernhard von Bülow in Wilhelmine Germany,” was the most popular on the Journalism History website in 2022.
He is a senior postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the KU Leuven in Belgium. He researches transnationalism, democratization, parliaments, celebrity politics, and the attention economy.
Betto van Waarden, senior postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the KU Leuven, is the winner of the 2023 Tom Reilly Award.
“I am honored to receive the Reilly Award and grateful for its recognition of my efforts to communicate my research to the public, which is an important ambition of mine,” van Waarden said. “The award helps to highlight journalism research on satire and its role in modern politics.”
While historical and contemporary thinkers have described politics as theater, van Waarden’s winning article moves beyond this representation of politics to understand how performance was central to politics around the turn of the twentieth century. It does so through an analysis of a large volume of hitherto unstudied caricatures of the German statesman Bernhard von Bülow.
This award is presented to the winners of the AEJMC History Division’s teaching competition. Members may submit an innovative teaching technique to the contest, which is judged by a committee each spring.
Teaching ideas should be original, tested, and creative techniques used by the author in teaching media history and could be used by other instructors or institutions. The competition welcomes a variety of teaching ideas, including those taught across a quarter/semester or taught as a module within an individual course. Of particular interest are teaching ideas that help instructors address one or more of these pedagogies: diversity, collaboration, community, or justice. The 2023 deadline for submissions has been extended to February 15.
Nominations are open for the AEJMC History Division’s 2023 Donald L. Shaw Senior Scholar Award. This division honor will recognize an individual for excellence in journalism history research who has a minimum 15-year academic career and a record of division membership.
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication will present its award for Outstanding Master’s Thesis in journalism and mass communication history in 2023, recognizing the outstanding mass communication history thesis completed during the 2022 calendar year.
The award will be presented during the member awards gala at the 2023 AEJMC conference in Washington, D.C.
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 January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2022. Membership in the AEJMC History Division is not required to submit.
This award is presented to the winners of the AEJMC History Division’s teaching competition. Members may submit an innovative teaching technique to the contest, which is judged by a committee each spring.
Teaching ideas should be original, tested, and creative techniques used by the author in teaching media history and could be used by other instructors or institutions. The competition welcomes a variety of teaching ideas, including those taught across a quarter/semester or taught as a module within an individual course. Of particular interest are teaching ideas that help instructors address one or more of these pedagogies: diversity, collaboration, community, or justice. The 2023 deadline for submissions is January 15.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s History Division is soliciting entries for its annual award for the best journalism and mass communication history book. The winning author will receive a plaque and a $500 prize at the August 2023 AEJMC conference in Washington, D.C. Attendance at the conference is encouraged as the author will be invited to be a guest for a live taping of the Journalism History podcast during the History Division awards event.
Teri Finneman, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is the winner of History Division’s Exceptional Service Award.
This important award is given by the division’s chair and vice chair for exceptional service to the History Division. Finneman was the Chair of the History Division in 2020, and is currently is the Publications Chair.
Edgar Simpson of the University of Southern Mississippi is the winner of the 2022 Diversity in Media History Research Award.
The award – presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) – recognizes the outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history that addresses issues of inclusion and the study of historically marginalized groups or topics. The award winner is selected from research submitted for the annual conference competition.
Simpson won for the paper, “Spinning Hate: Mississippi’s post-Brown PR Offensive and the Secret Campaign Against “Agitators, 1956-1960.”
While all of the papers that were considered offer worthwhile insights into issues of gender, identity, and race representation in media, this particular paper does excellent work examining an important moment in media history that continues to have implications for current moment; as the author(s) state: “These incidents, the study argues, are not just quaint echoes of a dead past, but rather a rare window into what manipulating the public sphere looks like.”
Through an examination of public relations practices in the state of Mississippi following Brown vs. Board of Education, this scholarship advances existing scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement, the press, and public relations, “by examining the extraordinary efforts of the Sovereignty Commission to maintain whiteness as policy by manipulating the public sphere through both accepted public relations practices and the more nefarious art of coercion.”
The study relies on the commission’s archives, opened to the public in 1998 after a 21-year Freedom of Information Act suit, along with other relevant historical resources, to examine the work of this commission and, more importantly, how this commission’s agenda sought nothing less than to manipulate the public sphere (alá Habermas) to gain support for its agenda of ongoing segregationist practices and policies.
This paper raises important and timely questions about the importance of information sourcing and verification and the need for journalists to ask tough questions of public officials and organizations and the information they readily provide.
Simpson will receive a plaque and cash prize for their award-winning research. He will also be recognized during the History Division’s business meeting on July 28th virtually.
