Lisa D. Lenoir (Indiana) received Indiana University’s Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellows Program award to advance her research on the life and career of The Chicago Defender’s Mattie Smith Colin. The fellows program supports IU faculty with promise to be national and international leaders in their discipline. Lenoir’s research focuses on media discourses surrounding journalism, activism, and identity, and consumer culture.

The 2024-2025 fellowship features a $50,000 grant, which allows her to host scholars and to conduct archival and oral history work to bring Colin’s work to the forefront, focusing on the journalist’s career from 1950-2002. Colin is known for covering the return of Emmett Till’s body from Money, Mississippi to Chicago, a critical moment in the long Black civil rights struggle. In addition, the journalist worked as a food and fashion editor. Lenoir knew Colin during her tenure in Chicago, while working as a fashion editor for the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Mattie Smith Colin Project has been generously supported by grants from AEJMC’s Commission on the Status of Women and the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA).

Tom Mascaro (Bowling Green) has co-authored a revised edition of William Porter’s 1976 classic, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years, Updated with Analysis of 21^st Century Threats to Democracy (University of Michigan Press). The expanded version includes several new chapters, additional Documents of Significance, several key analyses of First Amendment issues, and a critique of the role of academe in the pursuit of rampant authoritarianism.

Do you have member news to share? Send your updates for the next Clio to Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen at caitlinc@uidaho.edu.

Where are you currently getting your Ph.D. and/or what is your current position?

I am finishing up my dissertation at the University of Missouri, which I will defend in the Fall. In addition to finishing up my dissertation, I will start as an assistant professor at in the Department of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis this Fall. 

What brought you to grad school?

As a young undergrad student, I grew a love of research through the McNair Scholars program. Engaging with my mentors in the program showed me what I wanted to do with my career. Entering grad school, my goals were reaffirmed by learning from the faculty at Ohio University. From there, I decided to return to my undergraduate alma mater to finish my PhD and once again learn from the faculty that first encouraged me in my journey. 

The Broadcast Education Association (BEA) announced Noah Arceneaux (San Diego State University) will become the new editor of the Journal of Radio & Audio Media. The journal publishes research on radio’s contemporary and historical subject matter, and the audio media that have challenged radio’s traditional use. 

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.