The board of trustees at Albright College approved the promotion of Jon Bekken to full professor in January 2018; the promotion will take effect with the Fall 2018 semester.

Joel J. Campbell and Kristoffer D. Boyle, Brigham Young University School of Communications, published “Artemus Ward: The Forgotten Influence of the Genial Showman’s Mormon Lecture on Public Opinion of Mormons in the United States and Great Britain,” in The Journal of Popular Culture, October 2017 (Vol. 50, Issue 5, pp. 1107-1126).

Caryl Cooper, Alabama, and Aimee Edmondson, Ohio, met up at the University of Alabama where Cooper gave a civil rights history tour to Edmondson’s Ohio students as part of Edmondson’s Civil Rights & Media class. Edmondson took her students on a week-long civil rights tour through the South during Spring Break and Cooper gave a tour of the key civil rights history sites at Alabama. Edmondson notes that she and Cooper met through AJHA, and Ohio and Alabama came together to learn/teach some history!

David Copeland was named Elon University’s sixth Distinguished University Professor in a ceremony in November 2017. The award is given to senior university faculty upon occasion by the university’s president who solicits nominations from the faculty to honor teaching, scholarship, leadership, and service to the Elon University community. Elon was founded in 1889.

David Dowling, associate professor at the University of Iowa, is author or co-author of five recent or forthcoming articles. They are: Dowling, David. “Emerson in Media Studies and Journalism” in Approaches to Teaching Emerson’s Essays and Other Works, ed. Sean Meehan and Mark Long. Modern Language Association, (in press) 2018; Dowling, David. “Emerson’s Newspaperman: Horace Greeley and Radical Intellectual Culture, 1836-1872” Journalism & Communication Monographs 19.1 (Spring 2017); Dowling, David. “Banned in Britain: Marilynne Robinson’s Radical Environmental Journalism,” under review at Literary Journalism Studies; Subin Paul [student author] and David Dowling, “Ghandi’s Newspaperman: T.G. Narayanan and the Quest for an Independent India, 1938-1946,” (in press) Modern Asian Studies; and David Dowling and John Haman [student author], “New Horizons for TeachingJournalism History: A Multimedia Approach” American Journalism 34.3 (2017): 353-362.

Kate Dunsmore, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Fairleigh Dickinson University, is now Director of the department's MA in Communication Program.

Michael Fuhlhage was awarded the Bernard Brock Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Communication for 2017 by the Department of Communication at Wayne State University, where he is assistant professor.

Former AJHA President and Founding Member Mike Murray was voted UM Board of Curators' Distinguished Professor Emeritus by the four-campus University of Missouri governing board, meaning he will retain his office on the St. Louis campus and also continue teaching one section of "Media History.” Mike was honored by UM System President Mun Choi -- with family members at a MU vs. Florida game. He also recently published the 5th edition of Media Law & Ethics (New York: Routledge / Taylor & Francis, 2018) along with long-time co-author Roy L. Moore, plus J. Michael Farrell and Kyu Ho Youm (Oregon). 

Teresa Styles, Morehouse College, was a panelist at the Georgia Bar & Media Judiciary Conference in Atlanta titled, “Georgia Judges, Journalists and Lawyers And the First Amendment.” Panelist Tony Maddox of CNN International, Kevin Riley of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kevin Sack of The New York Times joined Styles on the topic of the “Cultural Challenges to the First Amendment: The Next Generation, Hate Speech and Fake News.” The moderator was Ron Thomas of Morehouse College.

Ronald R. Rodgers, Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator, Department of Journalism, University of Florida, is publishing this month his long-awaited book, The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism: The Pulpit versus the Press, 1833-1923. The publisher, the University of Missouri Press, writes, “Ronald R. Rodgers examines several narratives involving religion’s historical influence on the news ethic of journalism: its decades-long opposition to the Sunday newspaper as a vehicle of modernity that challenged the tradition of the Sabbath; the parallel attempt to create an advertising-driven Christian daily newspaper; and the ways in which religion—especially the powerful Social Gospel movement—pressured the press to become a moral agent. The digital disruption of the news media today has provoked a similar search for a news ethic that reflects a new era—for instance, in the debate about jettisoning the substrate of contemporary mainstream journalism, objectivity. But, Rodgers argues, before we begin to transform journalism’s present news ethic, we need to understand its foundation and formation in the past.”