Leigh Moscowitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication, is a 2010 award recipient in the Scholars Program of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Moscowitz will receive a grant in support of her ongoing research on media representations of gay marriage. Her doctoral dissertation at Indiana University, which also addressed this topic, won AEJMC’s 2009 Nafziger-White-Salwen Award as the outstanding dissertation in journalism and mass communication.
The AEJMC Scholars Program is a highly competitive grants program designed to develop and nurture outstanding teachers and researchers in journalism and mass communication. The program’s mission is to identify, encourage and recognize some of AEJMC’s most promising scholars by providing funding for research or teaching projects.
“We congratulate Leigh Moscowitz on this remarkable and significant accomplishment,” said Brian McGee, chair of the Department of Communication. “Leigh Moscowitz continues to earn recognition as our of our discipline’s most promising scholars.”
The AEJMC Scholars Program awards research and teaching grants each year to up to four AEJMC members or teams. These grants encourage innovative and timely projects in journalism and mass communication.
Proposals for the AEJMC Scholars Program were solicited in 2009, and selections were made in January 2010. Other than Moscowitz, award recipients for 2010 are faculty members at Colorado State University, Hunter College of The City University of New York, Louisiana State University, and the University of Minnesota.
AEJMC expects to showcase initial results from the first round of these grants at a special session at the 2010 AEJMC Denver Conference.
Dr. Moscowitz’s recent awards go beyond her research. In 2009, Dr. Moscowitz was voted the department’s outstanding teacher by undergraduates in the Department of Communication. No first-year faculty member had won this award prior to 2009.
With one of the largest undergraduate majors at the College of Charleston, the Department of Communication enrolls more than 800 students in its undergraduate and graduate programs. Students in the department study such topics as political communication, interpersonal communication, journalism, and public relations. The department is housed in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.