Rachel Grant is the chair of the Media History Division
We are less than a month away from this year’s conference in Philly. So much work and dedication happened behind the scenes, and I want to thank all the executive members of the History Division leadership. I especially want to thank our vice-chairs Brian Creech (program chair) and Melissa Greene-Blye (research chair) for organizing our panels and research competition. Also, thank you to everyone who submitted and reviewed submissions. Our division has the most dedicated members who continue to help elevate the importance of historical research.
We have an exciting schedule this year and we have an included abbreviated schedule of all our division’s sessions in this issue of Clio. For a full schedule of AEJMC events, check out the program online.
Fordham University associate professor Beth Knobel has won the 2024 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award for her conference submission, “Breaking Barriers: Ed Bradley’s Early Years in Radio.”
Presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the Diversity Award recognizes the outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history submitted to the annual paper competition that address issues of inclusion and the study of marginalized groups and topics. Knobel will receive a cash prize during the division’s awards gala on August 7 at the AEJMC National Convention in Philadelphia, PA.
The judges for the History Division’s Diversity Award recognized the richness and depth of Knobel’s primary research and her compelling storytelling ability.
“We had a very strong, and very competitive, group of Finalists for this year’s award. ‘Breaking Barriers’ stood out for being richly embedded within this year’s conference theme, connected to its location, and the ways it wove oral history, archival broadcast media, and traditional print journalism sources into a vivid narrative of overcoming structural inequality in the radio industry.”
The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected A.J. Bauer, Erin Coyle, Michael Fuhlhage, and John Vilanova as the winners of this year’s Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching of Media History.
This sixth annual award recognizes transferable, original, tested, and creative teaching ideas, especially those that engage with diversity, collaboration, community, or justice.
This year’s winners will present their teaching practices this August at AEJMC’s National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and will be honored at the division’s awards gala.
Bauer, an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama, detailed an archival research methods activity aimed at showing students how historians develop narratives from archival materials and encouraging them to engage with archival documents in a tactile way. Bauer’s award submission described “sharing that sense of wonder and uncertainty” of archival work with students, and centered teacher-student collaboration, writing, “we are all trying to make sense of history, together.”
Coyle, an associate professor at the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, was named a Broussard Award winner for an interactive, candy-based classroom activity that encourages students to question their own perceptions, biases, and their impact on journalistic and historical writing. Coyle’s M&M sorting activity, paired with Wesley Lowery’s “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” engages both students’ present biases and the continued impact of decades of white news leaders’ values in mainstream media.
Fulhage, an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University, shared an activity for students to examine a major daily newspaper’s historical treatment of communities of color and to assess that coverage to determine whether the paper should offer an apology to those groups. Fulhage said the project brings “students of different races into dialogue about the significance and appropriateness of apologies by news organizations for their complicity in systemic racism.”
Vilanova, an assistant professor of Journalism & Communication and Africana Studies at Lehigh University, was awarded for his “critical fabulation” activity. In this teaching idea, Vilanova encourages students to research and construct a new reality from archival silences and violences, which “fuses the creative and the historical, recuperating lives and stories of people unacknowledged by the choices of the archivists.”
The History Division is sponsoring a hands-on preconference workshop exploring the use of computer-based digital humanities tools for media history research and analysis. Attendees will learn how to access digital data sources at scale and use computerized data analysis tools like sentiment analysis, topic analysis and data visualization. The workshop is intended for researchers who do not have access to large number grad students or research budgets and do not have advanced computer skills themselves. The workshop is hands-on. At the end, people should be able to conduct simple research projects using these tools and introduce these methods in their classes. The workshop will be held on August 7 from 1 PM to 5 PM. Cost is $10. Attendance is capped at 25. For more information contact Elliot King at eking@loyola.edu. Registration is available online.
Journalism History, the journal of the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), is celebrating fifty years of continuous publishing with a special commemorative issue. The electronic version was published Feb. 13, and can be viewed at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ujhi20/50/1?nav=tocList, and the print version should be mailed the first of March.
Anna E. Lindner, Michael Fuhlhage, D. T. Frazier, and Keena S. Neal are the winners of the 2024 Tom Reilly Award. Their article, “’If Ever Saints Wept and Hell Rejoiced, It Must Have Been Over the Passage of That Law’: The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act in Detroit River Borderland Newspapers, 1851-1852” was the most popular research study on the Journalism History website in 2023.
While conducting this research, all four scholars were associated with Wayne State University’s Department of Communication and what is affectionately called “Fuhlhage’s Research Gang.” Dr. Fuhlhage is an associate professor and he has successfully collaborated with his students on several research projects. Lindner, Frazier, and Neal were doctoral candidates at the time.
The History Division invites submissions of original research papers and extended abstracts on all aspects of media history for the AEJMC 2024 conference in Philadelphia. All research methodologies are welcome.
The 2023 AEJMC Journalism History Division business meeting was held on Thursday, July 27, 2023, at 1 p.m. EST. At its peak, 38 members were in attendance.
Division chair Madeleine Liseblad (California State University-Long Beach) began the meeting by sharing a link to the call for the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression symposium to be held at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia, November 3-4, 2023.
The meeting then started in earnest with the approval of the business meeting minutes from 2022. Teri Finneman (Kansas) motioned to approve the minutes, which were then seconded, and then approved unanimously.
“We will try to keep this to an hour, but that may be a failed attempt,” Liseblad began before offering an overview of the range of activities that run through the division in any given year, from publishing seven issues of Clio, to running multiple award competitions, to organizing research competitions for three conferences (the AEJMC annual convention, the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference, and the Southeast Colloquium), as well as supporting the range of activities around the division’s journal, Journalism History, which in the past year included continuing to run the podcast, manage the website, support a popular essay series competition, and administer diversity micro-grants.
The AEJMC conference countdown is on! We’re only a couple of weeks away from meeting in Washington, D.C. For me, I always get a personal and professional energy kick from attending the annual conference. I love listening to quality research and learning new approaches to things, but most of all, I love meeting and catching up with people.
Dr. Maddie Liseblad, History Division Chair
We have a great History Division conference program. Vice Chair Rachel Grant (Florida) and Research Chair Brian Creech (Lehigh) have worked hard on organizing our schedule of panels and research presentations. We start the conference with our annual Awards Gala on Sunday, Aug. 6 at 7:30 p.m. EST. The gala is a terrific opportunity to celebrate our award winners. You must pre-register for the event, but it only costs $5 to attend. There will be food, desserts, and drinks.
While we have something going on every day of the conference, I do want to point out two Wednesday (Aug. 9) events. We have the Jinx C. Broussard Award for Excellence in Teaching of Media History panel at 4 p.m. and our top papers presentation at 6 p.m.
Miglena Sternadori (Texas Tech) won the 2023 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award.
Texas Tech University associate professor Miglena Sternadori has won the 2023 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award for her conference submission, “The Last Invisible Minority: Tropes and Stigma in News Coverage of Intersex People Since 1752.”
Presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the Diversity Award recognizes the outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history submitted to the annual paper competition that addresses issues of inclusion and the study of marginalized groups and topics. Sternadori will receive a cash prize during the division’s awards gala on Aug. 6 at the AEJMC National Convention in Washington, D.C.
