COLLEGE PARK — Associate Dean Linda Steiner, a longtime professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, has been named one of six 2024-25 Distinguished Scholar-Teachers, UMD Provost Jennifer King Rice announced.
Steiner is the second Merrill College faculty member to ever be honored as a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. Fellow Associate Dean Sarah Oates was the first, in 2021.
The Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Program honors members of the UMD faculty who have demonstrated outstanding scholarly achievement as well as outstanding accomplishments as teachers. This program recognizes those who have led the way in both areas and who thus serve as models of excellence for the faculty of a top research university. A panel of former Distinguished Scholar-Teachers selected the winners.
The award comes with $5,000 to support instructional and scholarly activities, and recognition at the Fall 2024 Convocation. Each honoree will make a public presentation during the 2024-25 academic year on a topic of scholarly interest.
In his nominating letter, Dean Rafael Lorente called Steiner “a lynchpin of research-led teaching at Merrill College.”
“Her research has been central in moving the discussion of gender into the mainstream of communication studies, embedding our understanding of the role of gender within broader social, political and economic forces that shape the media,” Lorente wrote. “Professor Steiner has been a source of counsel and quiet mentorship for me since I first took on a leadership role as associate dean for academic affairs in 2015.
“Because of her commitment to scholarship, her leadership in the field of gender and media studies, her unwavering support for colleagues, her teaching and mentoring of Ph.D. students and her passion for equity, I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly recommend Professor Linda Steiner for this prestigious UMD award.”
Steiner, who has been on the Merrill College faculty since 2006, joined college leadership as associate dean in Fall 2023 to help onboard new faculty, manage faculty mentoring, and improve faculty and staff development.
She is the former director of the UMD ADVANCE program, an Office of Faculty Affairs initiative to support the recruitment, retention, advancement and professional growth of a diverse faculty. Now in her second term as editor of "Journalism & Communication Monographs," Steiner has published nine co-authored or co-edited books, most recently, "Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women's Suffrage."
Her research interests include media ethics, feminist theorizing and the conceptions/roles of women in the media workforce, especially journalism. Steiner is a past president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and a fellow of the International Communication Association. She worked for a small newspaper in upstate New York before going to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned her Ph.D. Steiner is an affiliate professor in UMD’s Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
For more information, contact:
Josh Land
joshland@umd.edu
301-405-1321