What is your current position(s): I’m a tenure-track assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. My interests include journalism history, race and news media, and journalism and democracy. This is my second year as a tenure-track professor at Merrill College. For a year before that, I was a visiting assistant professor while I finished my dissertation. I earned my doctorate from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers.

What is your favorite class to teach: My freshman Journalism History class. We talk about the social, economic, and technological trends that have influenced the production of journalism in the United States. We also talk very candidly about the many ways in which news organizations have either fulfilled their responsibilities to everyone in society or epically failed, because I want students to enter the industry with an understanding of the challenges they may face and the historical roots of those challenges.

A.J. is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on conservative news and right-wing media. He is currently working on a book for Columbia University Press titled Making the Liberal Media.

1. What is the primary focus or central question (s) of your history research?

How did right-wing media come to exert such an outsized influence over U.S. politics and culture? How has conservative news challenged professional journalism over the cultural authority to narrate and interpret public life? These questions are at the heart of my work and are key to understanding how contemporary U.S. politics have become so contentious and intractable.

Teri Finneman (Kansas) has launched a new podcast, The First Ladies. Lisa Burns is the first guest discussing why studying first ladies matters. Burns and Finneman are editing a book, A Cambridge Companion to First Ladies, that will release next year.

Finneman’s book, Reviving Rural News, with Nick Mathews (Missouri) and Pat Ferrucci (Colorado Boulder) released in February.

Elisabeth is an assistant professor of journalism at St. John’s University in New York. Her research focuses on the history of propaganda, international journalism, media-public affairs, and press-military tensions in the twentieth century.

1. What is the primary focus or central question(s) of your history research?

My research broadly explores the history of international journalism, government propaganda, military-media relations, and freedom of speech during wartime. I research reporters’ interactions with propagandists during past conflicts and, collectively, my scholarship argues how important it is to: 1) have journalists as eyewitnesses and foreign news as sources of information during conflicts, and 2) for scholars to dig deep and reveal how governments continue to build proficiency in propaganda and censorship that restrict reporters’ access to all sides of the story.

What is your current position(s)? Assistant Teaching Faculty, Loyola University Maryland, and PhD candidate at University of Maryland.

What is your favorite class to teach? I have a couple of favorites but first and foremost is Media Ethics which I teach as a seminar course with a focus on exploring mass communication practices and ethics through a DEIJ lens. It is open to any student and a surprising number of students who are not Communications majors sign up every semester. As a result, the conversations are very dynamic and the energy in the room is always palpable. Students say it was a class where they learned a lot and felt involved in their learning process, and I always end up learning something new. 

What is your current research project? My current research project is finishing my dissertation, an exploration of the experiences U.S.-based women journalists have with sexual harassment and sexual assault through their work, and their advice, given their personal exprience, to develop best practices for all journalists reporting on stories involving accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Fun fact about yourself? I can cook and it is one of my very favorite things to do. If I had to quit academia tomorrow and pick something new, I would cook like I was living a real life “The Bear,” making chaos menus for days.

Will Mari (LSU) won the Dr. Dimitrije Pivnick Award in Neuro and Psychiatric History, and with it conducted archival research at McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine, in July 2023. While there, he was also an invited visiting researcher at the Département de communication at the Université de Montréal.

What is your current position and favorite class taught: I am a brand new teaching assistant professor at the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It’s only my first semester here but my favorite class to teach so far has been multimedia storytelling. For some it’s their first experience making any sort of media in the journalistic form and it’s really gratifying to watch them grow in their confidence and capability. 

What is your favorite journalism history scholarship that you’ve worked on so far: I got an article published during my Ph.D. that looked at the collective memory around the reporting of Fred Rogers’ famous congressional testimony to John Pastore in 1969. Examining how the current collective memory of the event grew out of the contemporary reporting of the time (and getting my first experience requesting and utilizing archival material) was a ton of fun!

Do you have any interesting projects in the pipeline: I’ve begun the arduous process of trying to prepare my recently defended dissertation for further publishing, hopefully as a book. 

Fun fact about yourself: I got my start in media production (which ultimately led me here) making stop-motion LEGO short films as a kid.