Clarence Thomas, Virginia Commonwealth University

Where you work:

I am a tenured Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. I have been teaching college for 42 years—30 at VCU. I will retire in June 2021.

Where you got your Ph.D.:

I earned my Ph.D. in Media History at the University of Florida in 1990. I am the first man and the first African American to do so.

Current favorite class: 

I teach a variety of history courses, however, my favorite course is one that I created called Diversity in the Media.

Current research project:

I am currently interested in U.S. Presidents of the past who were controversial (like Trump) and how they might have used the media of the time.

Fun fact about yourself:

I love jazz, vocal and instrumental. I was a trombonist from elementary school through college.

George Daniels (University of Alabama) was named the recipient of this year’s Gene Burd Award for Research in Urban Journalism Studies by AEJMC. He also received $2,500 as part of the annual award, which purportedly aims to improve the practice and study of journalism in the urban environment.

Daniels award-winning research project is titled “Exploring the Role of Black Newspapers Filling Urban Government News Coverage.” The award recognizes high quality urban media reporting, critical analysis, and research relevant to that content and its communication about city problems, programs, policies, and public priorities in urban life and culture.

Rachel Grant (University of Florida) has been selected to participate in the virtual 2021 Intersectional Qualitative Research Methods Institute (IQRMI) from June 6-11.

This intensive, week-long institute, originating from the University of Maryland College Park, will provide instruction in methodological skills, writing, and navigation of institutional norms.

The goal of the institute is to enhance qualitative research and writing skills, develop critical intersectional perspectives for designing and interpreting research and develop and hone navigational skills to successfully negotiate academic career paths.

In retirement, Dave Nord (Indiana University) has drifted away from journalism history and into state and local history, especially the history of maps and mapping and the history of manufacturing. His most recent scholarly publication is an article in the December issue of the Indiana Magazine of History titled “The Flour-Milling Revolution in America, 1820–1920: The Indiana Experience.”

Will Mari (Louisiana State University) has an essay, “Materiality in Media History,” in the January 2021 issue of Historiography in Mass Communication.

David E. Sumner (Ball State University) is co-authoring a new edition of his 2010 book, The Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900 (Peter Lang), with Samir Husni of the University of Mississippi. Sumner also has consulted on an exhibition, featured in a recent New Yorker, of more than 200 historic magazines on display through April 24 at the Grolier Club (47 East 60^th Street in New York), from the collection of Dr. Steven Lomazow, a neurologist, who has a personal collection of more than 7,000 historic magazines. The exhibit is available online; to visit the Grolier Club for an in-person viewing, contact drlomazow@gmail.com.

Owen V. Johnson (Indiana University) will virtually present a paper, “Regaining & Expanding Their Voice: Slovak Mass Media, 1948-1968,” at the Thirteenth Annual Czech and Slovak Studies Workshop, organized by the University of Pittsburgh. Also, a podcast in which he participated, The Ernie Pyle Experiment!, has been named a finalist for a prestigious Audie Award.

Several of our History Division members participated in the twenty-eighth Symposium on the 19^th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, held virtually November 12-14, 2020, with six of its panels broadcast on C-SPAN and available for online viewing: “Depicting Soldier Experiences in the Civil War Press,” “Newspaper Coverage of Epidemics 1800-1920,” “Mid-19^th Century Presidential Press Coverage,” “Commemorating Soldiers in the Press,” “Ethnic and Immigrant Troops in the Civil War,” and “Western Press During the Civil War.” 

Teri Finneman (University of Kansas) has two chapters in the newly released book, Southern First Ladies: Culture and Place in White House History (University Press of Kansas). She examined media coverage of Sarah Polk and Varina Davis. 

Jon Marshall (Northwestern University) was interviewed by Agence France Presse and Helsingin Sanomat (Finland) for stories on the future of conservative U.S. media in the post-Trump era.

Kimberly Voss (University of Central Florida) is working on a public history project having women’s page editors from the 1950s and 1960s inducted into state journalism halls of fame. In fall 2020, her nominations led to Marie Anderson in Florida and Marjorie Paxson in Oklahoma being inducted into their state’s hall of fame. She encouraged others to induct women journalists into halls of fame through the National Council of Public History – both with articles in the NCPH newsletter and taking over its Instagram account for a week in November 2020.

Rauf Arif, Ph.D. 

Assistant Professor

College of Media & Communication

Texas Tech University

QUESTIONS:

Where you work: College of Media & Communication (CoMC) @ Texas Tech University.

Where you got your Ph.D.: The University of Iowa.

Current favorite class: Social Media & Social Change. This grad level course explores the role that social media plays in social change, ranging from the comparative analyses of online political activism of authoritarian societies—such as the Arab Spring (2010/11)—to the most recent social movements in the Western settings—the Occupy movement, #Brexit, #MeToo, #Times Up, #Take a Knee and #BlackLivesMatter. This class looks at these modern social and political uprisings in the context of historical developments that have led to the most recent unrests and social movements of our time.

Current research project: My current research project is about understanding the role and contribution of communication in the development and sustainability of political uprisings in non-west societies, such as Pakistan, Egypt and Tunisia. As an outcome of my research work, I am happy to share my 2020 book, “Movements for Change: How Individuals, Social Media and Al Jazeera Are Changing Pakistan, Egypt and Tunisia” (Peter Lang Publishing). The book explores digital social movements in the context of digital media while discussing the historical contexts of the case studies.

Please follow this link to learn more about it: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/71009?tab=aboutauthor&format=HC

Fun fact about yourself: I am a huge fan of Star Wars movies and The Mandalorian television series is my new obsession 🙂

Joe Saltzman (University of Southern California), has curated and created three videos of almost 23 hours of content that capture long-lost images of the journalist in silent film for the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at USC Annenberg. The first video features excerpts from 56 movies from 1890 to 1919. The next two include excerpts from 150 movies from 1920-1929 and cover celebrity journalists, newsboys, and newspapers. The videos complement Saltzman’s five-year landmark study of The Image of the Journalist in Silent Film, 1890 to 1929, Parts One and Two, which contains an analysis of 3,462 silent films.

Will Mari (Louisiana State University) wrote about the history of American newsrooms as seen in cartoons for the British Library’s “American Collections” blog.

Owen Johnson (Indiana University) wrote a piece for the fall 2020 Ernie Pyle World War II Museum Newsletter, “Ernie Pyle & the Ku Klux Klan,” and was interviewed for a television spot about Pyle on the local ABC news affiliate.

Where you work: I am an associate professor in the journalism department in the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, where I am also a faculty member in the Media and Communication Ph.D. program. 

Where you got your Ph.D.: I have a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and MAss Communication. As a timely sidenote, alums of this program have been pushing to change the college’s name upon learning that Henry W. Grady, known for being a proponent of “The New South,” included in his vision continued segregation and white supremacy across the South. More information on the name change effort can be found here.

Current favorite class:  I am very lucky to teach a range of classes in our Ph.D. program, and doubly lucky that Temple has long been a program committed to critical perspectives, qualitative inquiry, and theory-driven cultural studies work. I teach an advanced methods class on text-based methods, primarily critical textual analysis, mediated discourse analysis, visual analysis. This semester, I am excited to include units on the analysis of policy documents and institutional discourse, analysis of media objects and infrastructures, and approaches to using textual methods in digital spaces. I’ve found the methods and theoretical perspectives at the heart of British Cultural Studies to be a useful touchstone for this class and get really excited when our students discover how to think deeply and critically about texts and the ways in which they crystallize a range of social relations.

Current research project: I’ve got two projects running simultaneously, which is generally how I work. First, I am finishing a short book about journalism education in the digital age, looking at how discourses about digital changes in the news industry over the past couple of decades have situated journalism education as a particular site of discursive contest, where visions of the future are often struggles over who should have greater influence over the field of journalism. Secondly, I am continuing an ongoing project looking at how journalism and various other forms of public discourse have positioned tech industries as arbiters of the public sphere. Specifically, I am working on an essay looking at how Mark Zuckerberg has sat at the center of these discourses, finding that discussions and debates about his persona and personality often displace more urgent debates about what technology companies’ authority over our public lives should actually be.  

Fun fact about yourself: One time, Bob Dylan’s road manager obliquely threatened to slice off both of my thumbs.

Elisabeth Fondren (St. John’s University) recently participated in a global panel on civility in political communication organized by the University of Vienna, Austria. She spoke about American efforts to promote propaganda literacy through public education and the press before and during World War II. 

The Society of Professional Journalists chapter that Nick Hirshon (William Paterson University) founded and advises was recognized in November as the National Campus Chapter of the Year, out of almost 100 chapters across the United States. SPJ cited eighteen programs and projects that Hirshon coordinated during the 2019-2020 academic year, including a discussion series with professional journalists on campus as well as trips to shadow a theater critic and a professional basketball announcer.

Vincent DiGirolamo (Baruch College) has received the American Historical Association’s 2020 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism for his book Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys (Oxford). The book explores the newspaper industry’s relationship with paid and unpaid labor from the era of colonial slavery to the end of the “American Century.” Crying the News previously won the Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award, the Philip Taft Labor History Prize, and the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Stephen Banning (Bradley University) has published Journalism Standards of Work Today: Using History to Create a New Code of Journalism Ethics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). The book’s premise is that the same concerns that gave rise to journalistic standards of work after the Industrial Revolution still apply in the Digital Age. Banning notes that the book is a culmination of 25 years of research into the origins of journalistic professionalization and the roots of the “Canons of Journalism.”

Debbie van Tuyll (Augusta University) has won the Donald L. Shaw Lifetime Award for Outstanding Service to Journalism History at the 2020 Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression.

Stephen Bates (University of Nevada, Las Vegas) delivered the annual State of the First Amendment Address at the University of Kentucky on November 12, sponsored by the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in the School of Journalism and Media. Bates is the author of the new book An Aristocracy of Critics: Luce, Hutchins, Niebuhr, and the Committee That Redefined Freedom of the Press (Yale).

Maddie Liseblad (Middle Tennessee State University) has written American Consultants and the Marketization of Television News in the United Kingdom, part of Peter Lang’s “Mediating American History” series. Liseblad combined previously inaccessible Frank N. Magid archives with interviews with Magid staff and British journalists to examine how television news evolved in the U.K. in the 1990s. American consultants spread the U.S. model—the origin of today’s on-air style—and changed television news globally by working with indigenous media.

Nicholas Hirshon (William Paterson University), Amber Roessner (University of Tennessee), and Kristin L. Gustafson (University of Washington, Bothell) have written “Reporting Today, With Yesterday’s Context” for the Columbia Journalism Review. They address the role of historical reporting in covering today’s news. The article emerged in part from Roessner and Gustafson’s work while serving as the History Division’s teaching standards co-chairs. In 2019, they set a goal to advocate nationally and internationally for the importance of history in journalism and mass communication curricula and established a teaching salon to support public scholarship that focuses on that advocacy.

Flora Khoo (Regent University) has written “The Ideological Influence of Political Cartoons on the 1884 U.S. Presidential Race” for American Journalism. Khoo analyzes the influence of political cartoons in Harper’s Weekly and Puck magazine, looking at their persuasive power as well as the public’s role in reinforcing the agenda in the 1884 U.S. presidential campaign (Grover Cleveland vs. James G. Blaine), a significant moment in political history.

Andrew E. Stoner (California State University, Sacramento) has written his tenth book, Courthouse Chaos: Famous and Infamous Trials, Mob Violence and Justice (Blue River Press), which details notable instances of mob violence at famous and infamous trials. In 2019, he released The Journalist of Castro Street: The Life of Randy Shilts (University of Illinois Press).

George Garrigues, a journalist and author, has written Marguerite Martyn: America’s Forgotten Journalist, which drills down to the newsroom level of Joseph Pulitzer’s 1905-1941 St. Louis Post-Dispatch. This illustrated book for general audiences highlights and interprets Martyn’s articles and drawings on child labor, the fight for women’s suffrage, and some of the earliest female politicians. A companion book, Liberty Bonds and Bayonets, offers keen observations on the Great War by Martyn, on the home front, and her husband, the foreign correspondent Clair Kenamore, with the troops on the Western Front. 

Will Mari’s (Louisiana State University) new book, The American Newsroom: A Social History, 1920-1960, is now available for pre-order with the University of Missouri Press. The book covers a time of great change and controversy in the field, one in which journalism was produced in “news factories” by news workers with dozens of different roles, and not just once a day, but hourly, using the latest technology and setting the stage for the emergence later in the century of the information economy. Mari uses memoirs, trade journals, textbooks, and archival material to show how the newsroom expanded our ideas of what journalism could and should be.

Owen Johnson’s (Indiana University) book, At Home with Ernie Pyle, originally published in 2016, is now available in paperback. The biography of the legendary World War II reporter celebrates Pyle’s Indiana roots, gathering for the first time his writings about the state and its people. In them, readers will discover the Ernie Pyle who was able to find a piece of home wherever he wandered.

By Kathryn J. McGarr, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Membership Co-Chair

Elizabeth Atwood (Hood College) has written a biography of Baltimore Sun reporter Marguerite Harrison, who was a spy for the Military Intelligence Division in the early 1920s. The Liberation of Marguerite Harrison, America’s First Female Foreign Intelligence Agent is published by Naval Institute Press and is available on Amazon and at other major booksellers.

Michael Schudson (Columbia University) has written Journalism: Why It Matters (116pp plus notes). The book, published in spring 2020, is part of Polity’s “Why It Matters” series of short books directed to undergraduates. It is focused on U.S. journalism, especially over the past 50 years, and also offers some international comparisons.

Jon Marshall (Northwestern University) was promoted to associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism. He was interviewed in August on WBAI radio on presidents and elections.

Pam Parry (Southeast Missouri State University) and Teri Finneman (Kansas University) recently spoke at an online event, “‘19 & ’52: Ike, Women and Equality,” sponsored by the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.

Owen V. Johnson (Indiana University)  has written “Ernie Pyle & Harriett Davidson:  Two Red-Headed Travelers,” published in Traces of Indiana & Midwestern History 32:3 (Summer 2020), pp. 46-55. The article tells the story of Ernie Pyle’s college girlfriend, both before she met him, and then after.  Although she died in 1994 at age 91, Johnson was able to locate her family, and also talk to some people who knew her well.

Dane S. Claussen was appointed Lecturer of Strategic Communications at the University of Idaho in August. Over the summer, the national nonprofit news organization he launched in March 2020, Nonprofit Sector News (also on LinkedIn and Facebook), had eight journalism interns and two IT interns from nine universities. He continues to edit Newspaper Research Journal, which he has done since November 2017.

Will Mari (Louisiana State University) will have an article published this fall in First Monday. “A Short History of Pandemic Coverage on the Internet” examines how previous pandemics, namely, SARS, H1N1 and MERS, were reported online in the early 2000s through the early 2010s.