Faculty and Staff

The fourteen full-time faculty members of the Department of Journalism are leaders in journalism education, research and practice.

Shenid Bhayroo

shenid@temple.edu
Shenid Bhayroo teaches courses in audio-visual newsgathering, broadcast journalism, and journalism and politics. He worked as an investigative journalist for the South African Broadcasting Corporation (public broadcaster) and covered South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission hearings in the 1990s. He has also worked as a freelance journalist, producer, cameraperson, and video editor for foreign media in South Africa. At the University of Johannesburg he taught courses in video documentary and audio-visual communication theory. His research focuses on the political economy of media. His current work examines ownership of news and information content and the commodification of online news. Read Professor Shenid Bhayroo’s full profile.

Fabienne Darling-Wolf

fdarling@temple.edu
Professor Darling-Wolf teaches publication design, international news communication, gender and the American mass media, and history of journalism. She also teaches qualitative research methods in the Mass Media and Communication doctorate program, and a six-week summer workshop in Contemporary Japanese Media and Culture at Temple University Japan. She was born and raised in a small French town, and lived in Texas, Japan, and Iowa before coming to Philadelphia. Her research focuses on processes of cultural identity formation. Her work is concerned with the impact of increasingly global communication flows on culture and social organization. Read Professor Darling-Wolf’s full profile.

Yvonne Fairfax

yfairfax@temple.edu
Ms. Fairfax is the Office Manager of the Journalism Department. Faculty and students rely on her exceptional organizational skills to keep the business of the Department running smoothly. The Journalism Office is open Monday through Friday from 8:30am to 5:00pm. Read Ms. Fairfax’s full profile.

Christopher Harper

charper@temple.edu
Professor Harper, co-director of the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, worked for more than 20 years in journalism at the Associated Press (Chicago), Newsweek (Chicago, Washington and Beirut), ABC News (Cairo and Rome) and ABC 20/20. He previously taught at New York University, Rostov State University (Russia) and Adam Mickiewiez University (Poland). He teaches Ethics, History of Journalism, Journalism and the Law, Journalism Research, International Reporting and a variety of reporting courses. His research has focused on community journalism and multimedia applications, although his current work deals with the baby boomer generation. He has written and edited six books. Read Professor Harper’s Full profile.

Susan Jacobson

susanj@temple.edu
Professor Jacobson started her journalism career in the mid-1980s working for The New York Times on an experimental computer news service. She worked in the Internet industry for many years, and teaches many of the new media courses in the department, including Publishing to the Web and Experimental Journalism. Her research interests include the impact of new media on the practice of journalism and journalism education, new narrative forms created by new media, and the development of mobile media. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Florida, her master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University and her PhD from NYU. She has more than 10 years’ experience in the new media industry, and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia Area New Media Association. Read Professor Jacobson’s full profile.

Carolyn Kitch

ckitch@temple.edu
Professor Kitch teaches or has taught courses including History of Journalism, Critical Perspectives on Journalism, Magazine Editing and Design, Intro to Magazines, Gender and American Mass Media, and The American Magazine. She also teaches doctoral classes including Media and Social Memory, Critical Analysis of Mass Media, and Qualitative Research Methods, and she has served as the Faculty Director for SCT’s programs in London (2001, 2003, and 2010) and in Dublin (2006). Her research focuses on journalism history, media and memory , and public memory. She has authored or co-authored four books: The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines (UNC Press, 2005); Journalism in a Culture of Grief, co-authored with Janice Hume (Routledge, 2008); and Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (forthcoming in February 2012 from Penn State University Press). For 11 years, she was a magazine editor and writer in New York City. Read Professor Kitch’s full profile.

Andrew Mendelson (Department Chair)

amendels@temple.edu
Professor Mendelson teaches classes in photojournalism and documentary photography, visual literacy, journalism and society and social science research methods. His research interests focus on the role(s) that photographic (still and motion) images play in society through a variety of media – film, advertising, television and journalism – and how we understand the world because of the photograph. Read Professor Mendelson’s full profile.

George Miller

gwm3@temple.edu
Professor Miller teaches courses in newswriting and reporting. He worked at the Philadelphia Daily News for more than 11 years, serving as a staff photographer, features writer, general assignment reporter and police beat writer. His words and images have appeared throughout the paper, in every section. Read Professor Miller’s full profile.

Maida Odom

mcodom@temple.edu
Professor Odom teaches courses in newswriting and investigative reporting. She was a reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer for more than 20 years. She is the director of the Journalism Department’s Internship program. Read Professor Odom’s full profile.

Larry Stains

lstains@temple.edu
As Director of the Magazine sequence, Professor Stains teaches courses in magazine writing, editing and design. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the magazine industry, and has worked in various capacities for The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Worth, GQ, USA Weekend, This Old House Magazine, Sports Illustrated, AARP Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Money, Philadelphia Magazine, Child, Men’s Health and Best Life. Read Professor Stain’s full profile.

Lori Tharps

tharps@temple.edu
Lori L. Tharps teaches or has taught the following classes at Temple: Magazine Writing, Magazine Editing, Race and Racism in the News and Ripped from the Headlines: Using Journalism Tools to Create Fiction. She likes to write stories about race, identity and pop culture. Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, Tharps was a magazine writer and editor, working on staff at Vibe magazine and Entertainment Weekly before embarking on a freelance career. She is the author of two award-winning non-fiction books, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America and Kinky Gazpacho: Life, Love & Spain and the novel, Substitute Me. Read Prof. Tharps’s full profile.

Edward Trayes

trayes@temple.edu
Professor Trayes is Director of the Photography for the Mass Media sequence, and Director of the Master of Journalism program. He has taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses including news editing, photography, media management, communication research, publication graphics and design, and journalism research. He is the founding editor of Mass Communication Review, an international journal he edited from l972 until l986. His main research and writing interests are in media management, newspaper content, editing, and minority hiring and recruiting in the mass media. Read Professor Trayes’ full profile.

Karen Turner

kturner@temple.edu
She teaches broadcast and media studies courses including, Radio News Reporting, Experimental Journalism, and the online course Race and Racism in the News. Her research interests include news content development using and for various technologies, and media criticism with an emphasis on race issues. Before joining the Temple faculty, she was the press secretary to then-Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell. She has extensive experience as a radio journalist and talk radio interviewer having worked in such markets as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and New Brunswick, NJ. Read Professor Turner’s full profile.

Francesca Viola

fviola@temple.edu
Professor Viola teaches courses in broadcast news writing, TV news reporting and journalism law. She has many years experience in TV news reporting. She began her journalism career in print, as a reporter for the Germantown Courier. Later she worked as a writer for KYW-TV Eyewitness News (now CBS-3), then became the Associate Producer of the first Ten O’Clock News in this market at Fox-29. While at Fox-29 she was part of the team that expanded the evening broadcast to one hour, and produced a weekend news show. She was part of the Emmy-Award-winning team that covered the fire at the Meridian Building, one of the worst fires in Philadelphia history. Read Professor Viola’s full profile.

Linn Washington

lwashing@temple.edu
Professor Washington is the Director of the News-Editorial sequence and Co- Director of the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab. He teaches courses in news reporting, investigative reporting, and journalism law. He has many years’ experience as an investigative reporter. He is the author of the book Black Judges on Justice: Perspectives from the Bench. Read Professor Washington’s full profile.