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 21st 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.
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