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Kathy Roberts Forde Named Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow
Kathy Roberts Forde, associate professor and former department chair of journalism, has been named a Chancellor’s Leadership Fellow for 2018-19.
The Chancellor’s Leadership Fellows program seeks to cultivate future campus leaders by offering a half-time, one-year, temporary appointment to an administrative area on campus, and by providing shadowing and mentoring from the leaders of the host units. In addition, fellows are expected to launch a significant program during their fellowship year.
Forde will be working with Enobong (Anna) Branch, associate chancellor for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, to help develop a strategic communications plan for the Office of Equity and Inclusion, and will be working to promote and increase the capacity of the campus community to understand and engage across differences.
“Kathy brings leadership experience from her time as journalism department chair and a deep understanding of the role of communication in building community,” says Branch. “Her scholarship on the role of the news media and communication in struggles for racial justice informs the perspective she brings to our office.”
Forde, who joined the faculty in 2014, is a historian of American journalism with research interests in the First Amendment, the African-American freedom struggle, literary journalism and the history of the book and print culture. Her 2008 book Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment received the Frank Luther Mott-KTA and the AEJMC History Division book awards. She is currently working on a second book, a publication and reading history of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. She has twice received the AEJMC Covert Award for her journal articles and has published news reports based on her research in The Conversation and the Washington Post’s "Made by History."