Faculty & Staff
Faculty in the College of Media have earned numerous nominations and awards in both their professional and academic careers. Included among them are two Pulitzer Prize winners.
As a Washington Post reporter, Leon Dash earned a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism in 1995 for his profile of Rosa Lee Cuningham and her family. Brant Houston, an investigative reporter for 17 years, shared in a Pulitzer Prize as part of the staff at the Kansas City Star that covered the skywalk collapse at the Hyatt Hotel in 1981. He was also a member of the team that won a Headliner Award for followup investigations into the conduct of building inspectors in the Kansas City area. Today both are journalism professors at Illinois, and Houston holds the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting and Dash is a Swanlund Professor.
In 1956, three College of Media faculty wrote a seminal work examining the role of the press in society. "Four Theories of the Press," written by Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson and Wilbur Schramm, is still studied by journalism students around the country. Schramm also organized a national educational conference held at the University in the 1940s that is recognized as the catalyst for the beginnings of public broadcasting.
Faculty in the College continue to contribute to the media landscape with books, textbooks and reference material on topics that include the intersection of culture and advertising, investigative and immersive journalism, and the influence of communications on global issues.
The College's faculty members are consistently highly ranked by their students, according to the University's Instructor and Course Evaluation System.
To contact a department head or faculty member, see the complete lists: