Mary Jane Collier joined the C&J faculty as a professor of communication in January 2006. She came from the University of Denver, where she was a professor and former chair of the Department of Human Communication Studies in the College of Communication.
    Dr. Collier received her Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of Southern California in communication theory and research.
    She is the current president of the Western States Communication Association.
     Her research interests focus on negotiation of cultural identities, discourses of privilege, intercultural relating and conflict transformation, and issues of global social justice.

     Her work appears
in such journals as Communication Monographs, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Communication Quarterly, Western Journal of Communication, and Howard
Journal of Communication, and in various scholarly books and texts.
     Dr. Collier served as editor of volumes 23-25 of the "International and Intercultural Communication Annual": Constituting Cultural
Difference Through Discourse (2000), Transforming Communication About Culture: Critical New Directions (2001), and Intercultural Alliances: Critical Transformation (2002),
all published by Sage Publications.

    Assistant Professor Pamela Lutgen-Sandvik joined the communication faculty in Fall 2005. She received her Ph.D. at Arizona State University.
    Dr. Lutgen-Sandvik teaches and conducts her research in the area of organizational communication.

     She formerly worked in the field of social work, where she served as a nonprofit administrator in the fields of substance abuse treatment and women's advocacy.
     Her research includes extensive study of bullying in the work place . You can visit her home page.

    Joining the communication faculty in Fall 2005 is Assistant Professor Patricia Covarrubias, who comes from the University of Montana.
    Dr. Covarrubias is teaching courses in intercultural commun-ication, and she also has taught language in society, ethnographic research methods, organizational and small group communications.

     She is the author of a book, "Communication, Culture and Cooperation: Interpersonal Relations and Prenominal Address in a Mexican Organization."
     Dr. Covarrubias is fluent in her native tongue of Spanish as well as in English, French and Italian, and she hopes to continue her studies in the Japanese language. You can visit her home page.

    Associate Professor Dirk C. Gibson is the author of a book on serial murderers and the way they communicate to others.
    Titled "Clues from Killers: Serial Murder and Crimed Scene Messages," the book profiles ten well-known cases such as The Son of Sam, The DC Sniper, the Unabomber, the Zodiac, and Jack the Ripper.

    Professor Karen A. Foss was involved in two book publishing projects in the 2003-04 academic year.
    She is co-editor with her sister Sonja Foss and with Cindy L. Griffin of a collection of essays and readings by nine feminist theorists. The book is titled "Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory."

    Professor Kenneth D. Frandsen was honored with the 2004 Distinguished Service Award by the Western States Communication Association at its annual convention in Albuquerque.
    The award is the association's highest honor. It recognizes those who make significant contributions to WSCA and the communication disclipine.

      Dr. Ilia Rodríguez has joined the faculty of the Communication and Journalism Department with the commencement of classes in Fall 2003.
      She received her Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Minnesota. She comes to UNM from St. Cloud University in Minnesota, and has worked as a journalist at newspapers and Latino publications in Puerto Rico, California, Louisiana and Minnesota.

      A new book, "Recovering a Public Vision for Public Television," was published in April, 2003, by Dr. Glenda R. Balas, assistant professor in the University of New Mexico's Department of Communication and Journalism.
      This book investigates public media in the United States, noting how public television faced possible elimination of federal funding in 1995, potentially commercializing this unique type of broadcasting. The book investigates three important moments in the development of public media in the United States.

      Dr. Olaf Werder joined the Communication and Journalism faculty in the fall of 2002. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida and is teaching courses in the advertising sequence at the University of New Mexico.
      He also is the adviser for the UNM student chapter of the American Advertising Federation.     
  Dr. Werder says: "My teaching philosophy rests

on making myself not so much an expert in my field, but a partner in learning. In the long run, the greatest gift I can give to my students is to make myself obsolete. Paulo Friere has called such an approach to teaching a liberation pedagogy, in which professors are no longer the single source of knowledge in the classroom, but rather are engaged in helping students move from passive recipients to active creators of knowledge and ideas." Visit Dr. Werder's home page.

     The late Dr. Everett M. Rogers was selected in 2002 as the University of New Mexico's 47th Annual Research Lecturer — the highest honor that UNM bestows upon members of its faculty. Rogers was the UNM Regents' Professor of Communication and Journalism.
      The title of the public lecture he delivered on April 24, 2002, in the UNM Continuing Education Auditorium, 1634 University Blvd. NE, was "Applications of the Diffusion Model: Spread and Consequences of the Internet."
      Dr. Rogers was the recipient of numerous awards from scholarly
   

and professional organizations, and he was a UNM Regents Professor from 1999 until his death in 2004. He had been named a Fellow of several prestigious organizations.
     His book, Diffusion of Innovations, was selected by Inc. Magazine as one of the ten classic books in business in 1996; was selected as the winner of the First Fellows Book Award in the Field of Communication by the International Communication Association, 2000; and was named as a Significant Journalism and Communication Book of the Twentieth Century.
      Link to a Tribute to Dr. Rogers.

      Miguel Gandert, a professor in the Department  of Communication and Journalism, was awarded a 2002 Fulbright Scholarship. He travelled to Bolivia where he photographed the feast day celebrations of the Indo-Hispanic culture there.
      Gandert's Fulbright enabled him to spend about two months for each of the next three years in Bolivia. "The Fulbright allows me to continue looking at Mestizo ritual among the poorest

indigenous populations in Latin America," he said.
     "The project will show the connection between American Southwestern rituals and those of Bolivia, demonstrating unique shared heritages, both of which are products of 400 years of Meso-American and Spanish colonialism."
      A Gandert photographic exhibit opened in May 2002 in La Paz. Gandert recently received a Southwest Book Award for his book, Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland.