Ph.D. University of Kansas
M.S. University of Kansas
M.A. Emporia State University
B.A. Mills College 

After serving as SMAD’s director from 2016 to 2022, I returned to my first love: the classroom. As a former journalist, I’m at home in the Journalism concentration, where SMAD 471 Media Ethics and SMAD’s writing and reporting courses are offered. I’ve also taught SMAD 101 Intro to Media Arts & Design and SMAD 150, our media literacy/critical thinking course for gen-ed credit.

My own career began in Midwestern newsrooms — the Topeka Capital-Journal, Lawrence Journal-World and Emporia Gazette — and led me to academia, where I have studied democratic challenges and opportunities as viewed through media organizations. I am most interested in the contradictory role of the media in both perpetuating inequity and encouraging our society to achieve its most noble ambitions. Specifically, I am intrigued by how members of the media, who form a constitutionally protected institution, have viewed their obligation to the public and how that has changed over time.

This curiosity about the democratic paradox motivated my first book, Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action (Illinois, 2013). That project was honored with the Frank Luther Mott Kappa Tau Alpha Award for a research-based book on journalism. In 2019 the University of South Carolina honored me with the Ronald T. and Gayla D. Farrar Award in Media & Civil Rights History for an article published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Human and Civil Rights. I co-edited and contributed chapters to the volume Journalism’s Ethical Progression: A Twentieth-Century Journey (Lexington Books, 2019), and two books on press history are under contract (UMass Press and Routledge) for publication in 2024.