by Cathy Jackson, Norfolk State
Nominations and Elections Chair
It’s that time of the year when AJHA members learn about the candidates for open leadership slots. One AJHA member was nominated to serve as second vice president, and three members are were nominated for three board of directors seats.
The 2nd VP, under normal circumstances, rises to the presidency in two years, then serves on the board as ex-officio for an additional two years. Board members serve for three years and are expected to attend board meetings at the annual convention.
A nominee to the Board of Directors or to any officer position must have been a member of the AJHA for at least one calendar year immediately preceding the date of the election. No more than one person from an institution can serve on the Board at one time.
The election will be conducted via online survey, distributed in early September. A write-in option will be available for each position.
Below are brief bios for each nominee.
Second Vice President
Michael Fuhlhage is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University, in Detroit. He is a past winner of the National Award for Excellence in Teaching from the American Journalism Historians Association. An AJHA member for 18 years, he has served in many capacities, including chair of the Research Committee, panels coordinator, member of the Board of Directors, and a juror in the Book Awards competition, the Margaret Blanchard Dissertation Awards competition, and the AJHA McKerns Research Grant competition. Fuhlhage is the author of Yankee Reporters and Southern Secrets: Journalism, Open Source Intelligence, and the Coming of the Civil War (2019), co-editor of the Routledge Companion to American Journalism History (in press), and co-author of Newspapers’ Apologies for Complicity in Systemic Racism (forthcoming). His research interests include the development of stereotypes about Mexicans in U.S. mass media, the mid-nineteenth-century press, and the history of the book in American culture. Fuhlhage, noting the debt he owes AJHA for his successful academic career, said it has been a source of inspiration, instruction, direction, friendship, and networking. A role in AJHA leadership will allow him to encourage an expansive definition of diversity in scholarship, help junior scholars, and defend history against those who seek to undermine it.
Board of Directors
Mark Bernhardt is a history professor at Jackson State University. He has been a member of the American Journalism Historians Association for seven years and currently serves as chair of the History in the Curriculum Committee and on the editorial board of Historiography in Mass Communication. He is the recipient of the 2020 Joseph McKerns Research Grant and has published in both American Journalism and Journalism History. His research interests include how newspapers, films, and television engage in public discourse about social and cultural issues connected to imperialism and its legacy in the transnational North American West, U.S. involvement in wars, and intersectionality in U.S. society. He values AJHA because it serves as a home for interdisciplinary scholars in a variety of fields who share the common interest of studying history. His desire is to strengthen AJHA, help it grow, support ongoing advocacy to include media history as a requirement in the Mass Communications curriculum, and build connections with history departments.
Christina Littlefield is an associate professor in journalism and religion at Pepperdine University. Her first book, Chosen Nations, investigated the late nineteenth-century social gospel in Great Britain and the United States, and she conducts ongoing research into muckraking work in those countries. Littlefield is updating a book with Richard Hughes for University of Illinois Press looking at Christian nationalism today, including its usage of right-wing media. As a higher education and religion reporter at the Las Vegas Sun, Littlefield’s investigative work led to jail time for a corrupt community college official. Littlefield is currently the AJHA web editor. She fell in love with the AJHA conference format in Little Rock in 2017, after she won the Rising Scholar research funding. She volunteered to serve because she deeply appreciates how the AJHA national conference supports members’ research, honors local journalists, provides extensive opportunities for networking, and includes a historical field trip.
Lori Amber Roessner, a professor in the University of Tennessee's School of Journalism & Electronic Media, teaches and studies media history and its relationship to cultural phenomena and practices. She is the author of Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson and the Sporting Press in America (2014) and Jimmy Carter and the Birth of the Marathon Media Campaign (2020), and she co-edited Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice (2018). Her research articles have appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and Journalism History, contributing to her receiving the American Journalism’s inaugural Rising Scholar award in 2014. Her 2020 Journalism History manuscript, “The Voices of Public Opinion: Lingering Structures of Feeling about Women’s Suffrage in 1917 U.S. Newspaper Letters to the Editor,” won the 2021 AEJMC History Division’s Covert Award, an annual award for the best mass communication history article in the previous year. Roessner was honored with the AJHA's 2017 Award for Excellence in Teaching and earned recognition from AEJMC History Division’s Inaugural Transformative Teaching of Media and Journalism History. Roessner, an AJHA member since 2006, regularly presents at AJHA and remains deeply committed to her service within the organization. She was a member of the AJHA Book Award Committee, a judge on AJHA’s Blanchard Dissertation Prize committee, a member of AJHA’s Board of Directors, the Chair of AJHA’s Election & Nominations Committee, president of AJHA’s Graduate Student Committee, and a regular reviewer for the conference and American Journalism.
