Faculty Profiles
A-F G-L M-R S-Z
Robin Andersen (Ph.D. California, Irvine) is Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Associate Chair of the department's graduate program, and Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program. She has written numerous journal articles and book chapters on media issues and the influence of TV and Advertising on American society. She is the author of Consumer Culture and TV Programming (Westview, 1995) and A Century of Media A Century of War (Peter Lang, 2006); and co-editor of Critical Studies in Media Commercialism (Oxford, 2000) and Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008). She is frequently interviewed as an expert source on media issues for radio, television and newspaper reporting. She is also featured in numerous educational documentaries.
Al Auster (Ph.D. SUNY at Stony Brook) is Associate Professor of Communication & Media Studies, and the author of Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theater, 1890-1920 (Praeger), Co-author of American Film and Society Since 1945, 3rd Edition(Praeger), How the War was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam (Praeger). His interests include Film and Broadcast History, and Economics of Media Industries.
Amy Aronson (Ph.D., Columbia) is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies. She is the author of Taking Liberties: Early American Women's Magazines and Their Readers (Praeger, 2002) and an editor of the international quarterly, Media History. She has written numerous articles on gender, media and American culture, and has edited or co-edited five books, including The Gendered Society: Readings (Oxford, 2007), a centennial edition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women & Economics (California, 1998), and the two-volume Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities (ABC-Clio), which was honored with the “Best of Reference” Award from the New York Public Library in 2004. A former editor at Working Woman and Ms., her work has also appeared in such publications as BusinessWeek, Global Journalist, and The Boston Globe.
Michael Callahan is a former deputy editor at Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire who has written for more than two dozen national magazines, including Vanity Fair, Men's Health, Redbook, Out, Essence, Vibe, and Philadelphia. A five-time winner for outstanding magazine writing from the Society of Professional Journalists, he holds a B.A. in journalism from Temple University. A member of the adjunct faculty at Fordham since 2002, he currently teaches magazine writing and introduction to journalism.
James A. Capo (Ph.D. Chicago), Director of the McGannon Communication Research Center, specializes in electronic media. A recipient of Fordham’s "Outstanding Teacher Award," he also taught in the SUNY system and directed academic programs at Oxford University. He has written for scholarly journals and corporate publications, as well as produced radio and TV shows. His recent work focuses on public interest issues in the Information infrastructure
Jennifer Clark (Ph.D. University of Southern California), is Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies. She is currently working on articles about the gender politics of masculine ennui in The Sopranos and Mad Men; female news workers in early TV; and the creation of sports celebrity on television, with case studies including Billie Jean King and the wrestler Gorgeous George. She is also developing a book based on her dissertation, which examines the relationship between the American Women’s Liberation Movement and the film and television industries of the 1970s.
Donna Cornachio (MS Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism) is an award-winning writer whose news articles, features and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek Magazine, and broadcast on National Public Radio.
Joseph T. Dembo joined CBS in 1960 after eight years with NBC News as a writer-reporter-producer. He is one of the originators of the all-news radio format for CBS. During his 28 years at CBS, Dembo was a CBS News correspondent, executive producer of The CBS Morning News on the television network, Rome bureau chief. He was Acting President of NationalPublic Radio and served on the NPR Board of Directors for three years. Dembo joined the faculty of Fordham University as a Professor in 1988.
Monique J. Fortuné (Ed.M. Teachers College Columbia University) has worked in electronic media for over 20 years. Her area of specialization is radio and her research interests include media history, media literacy and critical analysis, and computer mediated communication. She was Promotions Director at New York City radio station WWRL-AM , and spent seven years as Development and Marketing Director at Fordham University 's Public Radio Station WFUV-FM . She also served as radio curator for The Museum of Television & Radio. Ms. Fortuné teaches radio and television history, communication and mass media theory, and interpersonal communication courses.
David Fractenberg (Ph.D. Kansas) has spent the last three decades with thousands of managers and personnel in business and industry, health care, mental health care, care for the aged, and law enforcement , providing training in communication and human relations skills. He has also received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, won two instructional grants and a research grant from the SUNY Research Foundation, and was awarded the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. His teaching covers areas of communication and human relations, semantics, conflict-resolution, persuasion, and decision-making.
Lewis Freeman (M.Phil., M.A., Columbia) joined Fordham's faculty in 2000 after 18 years at Columbia University and Suffolk Community College. Hisacademic interests include communication theory, popular culture, children & media, and persuasion. His article on sitcoms is cited in the Encyclopedia of Television. He has served on the National Communication Association's Task Force on Discipline Advancement and on the boards of the Eastern Communication Association, the New York State CommunicationAssociation, and Qualitative Research Reports in Communication. He has analyzed communication issues for New York Times, CNN, WABC, MS-NBC, TV-Asahi (Japan) and numerous radio stations. Prof. Freeman is a communication consultant to universities, labor unions, businesses, lawyers, and individuals and is the recipient of 2 "Telly" awards.
Jonathan Gray (Ph.D. London, United Kingdom) is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies. He is the author of Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality (Routledge, 2006) and Television Entertainment (Routledge, 2008), and co-editor of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (NYU Press, 2007) and Battleground: The Media (Greenwood, 2008). He is also co-editor of Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture and on the editorial board of International Journal of Cultural Studies. Dr. Gray has published chapters in multiple books and in Critical Studies in Media Communication, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Popular Communication, Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, and Intensities: Journal of Cult Media. He studies the intertextual nature of the interaction between media text and audience; entertainment’s role in the public sphere; international communications; comedy and parody; fandom and antifandom; hype, synergy, and paratexts.
Margot Hardenbergh (Ph.D. NYU) is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies. She is published a number of book chapters and papers on the role of women in the media, ethical issues in the news and public access on cable televison. In 2004-5 she interviewed 15 television policy makers and shapers for the McGannon Center’s Television Oral History Project. She worked in the industry as a documentary and public affairs producer and continues serving on her community television board and producing documentaries.
Arthur S. Hayes (J.D Quinnipiac) is Associate Professor of Communication & Media Studies, and a former staff writer and editor for several news and trade publications, including the American Lawyer magazine, the National Law Journal and The Wall Street Journal. He also holds an MA in public communication, and conducts research in the areas of media law, the ethnic media, and journalism history, practice and criticism. His scholarly publications include chapters and entries in Ethnic Media in America (Vol. I & II), the Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications and the Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties.
Gwenyth Jackaway (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor ofCommunication & Media Studies, and the author of Media at War: Radio's Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924-1939. Her research interests include: media history, the impact of newmedia, free speech and regulation, with a particular focus on social responses to communication technologies and media scapegoating. The courses she teaches include: Freedom of Expression, Children and Media, Media Effects, Media Industries, Media Law, and Class, Taste and Mass Culture.
Beth Knobel (Ph.D. Harvard) is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies. She was the Moscow Bureau Chief for CBS News until December, 2006. In nine years at CBS, she was an on-air correspondent as well as a producer, winning an Emmy Award for coverage of the hostage taking at a Moscow theater in 2003, and an Edward R. Murrow Award (from the Radio and Television News Directors) and Sigma Delta Chi Award (from the Society of Professional Journalists) for her coverage of the terrorist act at a school in the city of Beslan. Dr. Knobel spent the last 14 years living in Moscow, where she worked for The Los Angeles Times, and the television news agency "Worldwide Television News," before joining CBS in 1997. Before moving to Russia, she worked for The New York Times, Ladies' Home Journal, and edited the Harvard Journal of Press and Public Policy. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University's Barnard College, and master's and doctoral degrees in Public Policy from Harvard University, where her specialty was Press, Politics, and Public Policy.
Steve Knoll is a writer whose articles, columns and book chapters on broadcasting and cable have been published in the Journal of Radio Studies, The New York Times, Forbes, Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Politics of Broadcasting, and elsewhere in the business and general press. His research interests include the history of electronic journalism and broadcast regulation.
Paul Levinson (Ph.D. NYU) is Professor of Communication & Media Studies, and the author of numerous books, including Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium (2004), Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age (2003), Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium (1999), and The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (1997). They have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, and six other languages. Dr. Levinson is also author of the following science fiction novels: The Silk Code (1999), Borrowed Tides (2001), The Consciousness Plague (2002), The Pixel Eye (2003), and The Plot To Save SocratesNew York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, U.S.A. Today, and by AP and Reuters. (2006) He has appeared on CBS, ABC, Fox News, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, The History Channel, CSPAN, NPR, the BBC, and the CBC, and is frequently quoted as a media expert in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, U.S.A. Today, and by AP and Reuters.
Tom McCourt (Ph.D. Texas) is Associate Professor of Communication & Media Studies, and the Associate Chair of the Undergraduate Major in Communication & Media Studies at Rose Hill. He is the author of Conflicting Communication Interests in America: The Case of National Public Radio (Praeger, 1999) and Digital Music Wars: Ownership and Control of the Celestial Jukebox (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). His research interests include media history, communication technology, music and cultural studies, with particular focus on the historical relationship of technology and the public sphere.
Jay Nickerson got his MFA in Acting from Brooklyn College/CUNY. He has worked as an actor Off-Broadway, in regional theater, in national tours, film, television, and radio. Jay has taught Voice and Speech classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and currently teaches acting at Brooklyn College. He is a member of the resident acting company at the Jean Cocteau Repertory Theater and a proud member of Actors Equity Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
Everett C. Parker (BD, DD, LHD Chicago Theological Seminary) has published Social Responsibility of Television in the United States (1994), along with Eli Noam and Alfred Schnieder. Some of the major awards he has received include: the Alfred I. Du Pont-Columbia University award for Public Service and Broadcasting, the American Jewish Committee Human Relations award, the Religious Heritage Foundation Faith and Freedom award, the Black Citizens for a Fair Media Racial Justice award, and the Pioneer award World Association for Christian Communication. Professor Parker is the founder and research associate for the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University. He is also the founder of the Foundation for Minority Interests in Media; initiator of the Petition that ceased the Federal Communications Commission to issue Equal Employment Opportunity rules that deregulated television and radio stations, opening jobs to women and minorities.
John M. Phelan (Ph.D. NYU) came to Fordham as Chair when McLuhan was Schweitzer Professor. He redesigned the undergrad curriculum, later founded the graduate program in Public [Interest] Communications, and became Founding Director of the McGannon Center for Ethics and Communication Research. Major books: Mediaworld: Programming the Public (1977); Disenchantment: Meaning and Morality in the Media (1980); Apartheid Media: Disinformation and Dissent in South Africa (1987). Post-doc research affiliate, Yale Program in Southern African Studies (1984-86); UN NGO Committee on Disarmament (1995-2001). Established Fordham Chapters of (then) Women in Communications and Society of Professional Journalists. Talent and writer for WFUV-FM series on Gulf War One and elections of 1988 and 1992. Lund University (Sweden) Summer 2001. Interests: Politics and Media; Propaganda and Censorship; Professional Ethics.
M. Z. Ribalow is artist-in-residence at Fordham, where he has taught for the last twenty years. A graduate of Princeton (as a University Scholar), he has previously taught at Rutgers (Graduate School); Ithaca College, London; andnumerous other schools. A film columnist, he has appeared as cinema historian on The Discovery Channel and on several upcoming DVD releases of classic films. Two dozen of his plays have received over 160 productions worldwide, and have won various prizes. His work is published and anthologized. He has won national awards for fiction, poetry, and musical lyrics, co-written ten children's books, three books on sports, and has had several screenplays optioned. Artistic Director of New River Dramatists, he has directed plays in London, NY and elsewhere. Hewas Joseph Papp's Production Associate at the NY Shakespeare Festival, Vice-President of The Creative Coalition and Arts Coordinator of The Global Forum.
Brian Rose (Ph.D. Wisconsin, Madison) is Professor of Communication & Media Studies, and teaches courses in film and television history, and media economics. His books include TV Genres (Greenwood Press, 1985), Television and the Performing Arts (Greenwood Press, 1986), Televising the Performing Arts (Greenwood Press, 1992), Directing for Television (Scarecrow Press, 1999) and Thinking Outside the Box (co-edited with Gary Edgerton, University Press of Kentucky, 2005).
Margaret Schwartz (Ph.D., MFA, Iowa) is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies. Her research interests include phenomenology of media and communication, communication ethics, translation studies, and feminist media studies. Her work has appeared in Genders, and The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She was a Fulbright fellow to Argentina in 2004. Her translation of Macedonio Fernández’s Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (Museum of Eterna’s Novel) is forthcoming from Open Letter, and is the first English translation of this seminal Argentine avant-garde novel. She is also developing a book based on her dissertation, which analyzed representations of the embalmed corpse of Eva Perón.
Mark Shanahan (MA, Fordham) is an actor, author and teacher. He has performed extensively on and off Broadway and around the country at The Kennedy Center, The Alley Theatre, The Denver Center, Bay Street, The Pioneer, Westport Country Playhouse and others, for such noted directors as Joanne Woodward, Mark Brokaw, and Greg Boyd. He has appeared on several films and television shows, including "Late Show With David Letterman." An award winning voice over artist, he narrates museum tours, documentaries and audiobooks, including the work of Fordham's Paul Levinson, whose "The Chronology Protection Case" he adapted into an Edgar Award nominated radio play. Shanahan is the co-author, with John Hamburg, of an untitled comic mystery currently under development at Universal.
Eva Maria Stadler (Ph.D. Columbia) works in the fields of Film Studies and Comparative Literature. Her research interests include film theory, history, and criticism; history and theory of the novel; narrative in prose fiction and film; literary theory, modernism; French and Francophone film.Recent publications include: “The Lady in Pink: Dress and the Enigma of Gendered Space in Marcel Proust’s Fiction” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature (2005); “Alain Resnais” and “Louis Malle” Encyclopedia of Documentary Film, Ian Aitken, ed. (Routledge, 2006); “Bresson, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin: Adaptation as Intertextual Dialogue,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video (2003); “Mallarmé’s La dernière mode: The Poet as Journalist,” Antemnae 2001; and “Francophonie et cinéma: l’exemple de deux cinéastes sénégalais,” Francographies (1995). Her book on Robert Bresson and the Dialogics of Cinema is forthcoming.
Fran Stern (MSJ, Boston University) is an award-winning broadcast, online and print journalist. During her decades at CBS News, ABC News, and local and regional radio and television newsrooms in southern New England, she covered stories and issues ranging from town government to Congress, from lost dogs to international assassinations, from NIMBY politics to national political conventions. Recognized as a pioneer in online journalism, she was a senior executive at the Prodigy online service, taking Prodigy from R&D to a commercial enterprise. She has been teaching journalism at the university level since 1994 and many of her former students now work at the most respected news media in the country.
Janet Sternberg (Ph.D. NYU) is Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies. She has published and presented on topics as diverse as linguistic theory, the history of the abacus, misbehavior in virtual communities, legal dilemmas in cyberspace, and mediated interpersonal communication, She is currently writing a book entitled Mediating Ourselves to Death, about the relationships among communication technologies and issues such as information overload, social alienation, and rampant consumerism. A native New Yorker who grewup in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, and French, this former Fulbright scholar also works with Fordham as well as professional associations to promote international academic collaboration.
Elizabeth Stone (Ph.D. NYU) is the author of two books, including Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers), reissued in 2004 with a new introduction; and A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student (Algonquin, 2002). She is adviser to The Observer, the award-winning paper at the Lincoln Center campus. She has written personal essays or done reporting for national publications including The New York Times, The Village Voice and Smithsonian Magazine. A professor with a joint appointment to English as well as Communication & Media Studies and English, she teaches journalism, memoir-writing, and American Literature courses in 20th century autobiography.
Lance Strate (Ph.D. NYU) is Professor of Communication & Media Studies. He has recently published several works, including Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment (Hampton, 2002), and The Legacy of McLuhan (Hampton, 2005), editedwith Edward Wachtel. He also organized the McLuhan Symposium held at Fordham University, and is the supervising editor of the Media Ecology Book Series for Hampton Press.
Ryan Thompson (MA Fordham University), is the assistant director ofcorporate and foundation relations in Fordham University's Office of Development and University Relations. His area of specialization is public relations and his research interests include celebrity propaganda, television, film and popular culture.
Michael V. Tueth, S.J. (Ph.D. NYU) is Associate Professor of Communication & Media Studies and Associate Chair of the Undergraduate Major in Communication & Media Studies at Lincoln Center. He is the author of Laughter in the Living Room: Television Comedy and the American Home Audience (Peter Lang, 2005) and a contributor to several other studies in television programming as well as journal articles in the field. His research interests also include film comedy studies, religion and the media, comic theory, and American theater history and criticism. He has worked for many years in film, television, and radio production asdirector, producer, writer and on-air talent. He has also contributed to America, the Jesuit weekly journal of opinion, as well as other religious publications.
James VanOosting (Ph.D. Northwestern) is Professor and Department Chair of Communication & Media Studies. He taught for sixteen years at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, including eight years as Department Chair. He served for six years as Dean of Arts & Sciences at Seton Hall University in northern New Jersey. He has done stints as Visiting Professor at the University of California, San Diego, and Louisiana State University. Dr. VanOosting has published five college textbooks, four novels, and a book of reflections on theology and aesthetics. Much of his scholarship, whether on freedom of expression, political rhetoric, or performance studies, derives from narrative cognition: how do human beings acquire, store, disseminate, and validate knowledge through stories and storying?
Thomas Veltre brings more than two decades of media productionexperience to his role as proprietor of The Really Interesting Picture Company. Formerly in-house media producer for the Wildlife Conservation Society, Tom’s production work ranges from documentaries, news and public affairs programming to interactive museum exhibits, instructional materials and “new media” applications. As a cinematographer, his work has been broadcast by all the major North American commercial television networks as well as PBS, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel, CNN, BBC, NHK (Japan). Tom did his Masters and Doctoral work in Media Ecology at NYU. He is a founder and international board member of Filmmakers for Conservation, and writes regularly on mass media and environmental conservation issues.
Edward A. Wachtel (Ph.D. NYU) is the Director of the Walsh Digital Media Laboratory at Rose Hill. He has published numerous articles on art, technology and perception, and recently edited The Legacy of McLuhan with Lance Strate (Hampton, 2005). Dr. Wachtel has produced video and multimedia works for a variety of venues, such as "Reflections of New York," which is a permanent exhibit in the New York State Museum in Albany, New York.
