Mark K. Dolan was awarded a contract with Peter Lang for a forthcoming book, African American Culture and the Press, and a fall sabbatical to begin researching his manuscript; he organized an Overby Center panel, “Images of Minority Women in the Media: Then and Now,” featuring Imani Cheers, director PBS NewsHour Extra; presented on the Chicago Defender for “Creating Community Progress and Economic Progress in Blacks’ Westward Expansion,” a research panel at the 2012 annual convention of the American Journalism Historians Association in Raleigh; and mentored many students, whose multimedia projects appeared in the Biloxi Sun-Herald during last fall’s James Meredith events.
Lecturer Robin Street brought home top awards from state, regional and national public relations groups last year. The awards were for a campaign called Diversity Rocks! that she and her PR students put on to encourage acceptance of diverse groups. The campaign won Best in Show from both the Public Relations Association of Mississippi and the Southern Public Relations Federation. In addition, a media kit Street personally prepared won Judges Choice from PRAM and first place in its category from SPRF. The campaign also won an Award of Excellence in the Public Relations Society of America’s Silver Anvil awards, the highest awards given in PR. In addition, Street was presented the faculty award for her commitment to diversity by the Black Student Union, ASB, and the office of the Dean of Students/ Multicultural Affairs.
Debora Wenger has been selected as a Mississippi Association of Broadcasters Fellow for 2013. She will work at WLOXTV in Biloxi this summer to help foster connections in the industry and bring work experience fresh from the newsroom back to the classroom. Her paper, "An examination of job skills required by top U.S. broadcast news companies and potential impact on journalism curricula," is featured in the spring edition of Electronic News. She is also co-authoring a book for Sage Publications with Dr. Samir Husni on the new paradigm facing media managers. In addition, Wenger presented two papers at the World Journalism Education Conference in Brussels, Belgium in July.
FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS
Assistant Professor Vanessa Gregory writes regularly about Southern art, food, and culture for Garden & Gun magazine. In the past year, she has also written about the science of sleep and about a groundbreaking study of Yosemite’s wolves for Wired.
Kristen Swain received a $114,366 research grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to examine social media and news coverage of intermodal transportation toxic spills. She also collaborated on four NSF proposals about ocean ecology with pharmacy colleagues. Swain’s risk communication articles appeared in Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies and Journal of Risk Analysis and Crisis Response. She co-authored articles for Innovations in Pharmacy and Annals of Behavioral Medicine and an AEJMC conference paper about BP’s reputation repair strategies. Swain is a finalist in the AEJMC Great Ideas for Teachers competition and will present a risk perception paper at a national public health conference in Atlanta.