Role 2 | DEV College of Media

Associate Professor and Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism
Director of Graduate Studies

Affiliations

Department of Journalism
Institute of Communications Research

Education

PhD in Journalism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media
MBA, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
AB in Government, Harvard University

Course Specialties

Journalism History
Business Journalism
Diversity
Qualitative Research Methods
Oral History

Background

Melita M. Garza is an associate professor and the Tom and June Netzel Sleeman Scholar in Business Journalism in the Department of Journalism. She is the 2022-2023 Chair of the Standing Committee on Research for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She was a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Prior to getting her PhD, Melita M. Garza was an award-winning journalist, working at the Chicago Tribune, Bloomberg news, and the Los Angeles Times during a two-decade-long career.

Awards

AEJMC’s Journalism History essay winner: “Ruben Salazar: Beyond Postage Stamp Memory” (2024)

Research and Creative Endeavor

Melita Garza is an American journalism historian who studies news as an agent of democracy, specializing in English- and Spanish-language news, the immigrant press, and coverage of underrepresented groups. She is the lead editor of The Routledge Companion to American Journalism History (2024). She is the author of They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the Tankard Book Award, the Frank Luther Mot/ Kappa Tau Alpha Award, and the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Tejas Fojo Award. Her research has also won awards from the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA), and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) divisions of: History, Minorities and Communication, and International Communication.