Carolina Velloso of the University of Maryland is the winner of the History Division’s 2020 Diversity in Journalism History Research Award.

Velloso, a Ph.D. student who also won the division’s top student paper award, won for her paper, “‘A True Newspaper Woman’: The Career of Sadie Kneller Miller.”

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.

Velloso will receive a plaque and cash prize and be recognized during the division’s business meeting on Aug. 7.

The judges for the competition were impressed with the paper’s writing and the use of an unprocessed archival material to reconstruct the subject’s life and career.

“This was a well-written and balanced narrative that puts the subject’s life in context with other figures in the media industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” said PF&R Chair Nathaniel Frederick, one of the paper’s judges. “The subject’s uniqueness and relevance is clearly illustrated by the use of various examples of their work.”

This is now the second year in a row that a Ph.D. student has won the Diversity Award.

“We’re absolutely thrilled to see students, who are the future of our field of journalism history, doing such amazing work already that is taking research in new directions,” Chair Teri Finneman said.

Velloso has a B.A. in history with high honors and an M.A. in journalism, both from the University of Maryland. She is a native of Brazil.

Velloso is broadly interested in issues of gender and the media. Her scholarship draws from feminist and critical theory to investigate the representation of women and minority groups in news coverage and the experiences of women exercising journalistic professions. Other research areas include U.S. media history; media ethics; and the intersection of gender, media and sports.

Her winning paper is the first in-depth scholarly inquiry into the life and career of Sadie Kneller Miller to introduce Miller into the canon of journalism history.

Miller filled a variety of journalistic roles at the turn of the twentieth century. She worked as a baseball journalist in her early career, covering the Baltimore Orioles for her hometown paper. Soon after, Miller picked up a camera to help enhance her baseball stories. In 1900, she submitted photographs she took at the Naval Academy in Annapolis to Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. This led to a job at Leslie’s as a reporter and photojournalist that would last sixteen years and produce more than 2,500 photographs, hundreds of which were published in Leslie’s, as well as hundreds of articles covering a wide array of the human experience.

As such, at any one time, Miller was covering a sports beat, traversing the country in search of interesting American people and places to profile, traveling to faraway lands to cover issues of international importance, or taking out her camera and snapping photographs to appear on news pages. That she did all four, and for more than two decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is remarkable, Velloso argues.

A Journalism History podcast episode featuring Velloso and her research will air in October.