COLLEGE PARK — DeNeen L. Brown and Dr. Krishnan Vasudevan, faculty members at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, have been promoted to elevated ranks, Dean Lucy Dalglish announced.
Brown has been appointed to full Professor and Vasudevan to Associate Professor with tenure.
Brown joined the Merrill College faculty in 2019 after more than three decades at The Washington Post, and had been an associate professor before her promotion.
“DeNeen Brown has had a brilliant reporting career covering issues and cultures that reflect the needs and interests of our students,” Dalglish said. “Her students have learned a variety of writing techniques from a master. Her continued creative work as a writer and documentarian benefits the entire University of Maryland community.”
Since coming to UMD, Brown has continued to write for The Post, including a series of stories on the deadly 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which led to the city’s mayor reopening an investigation into suspected mass graves.
That work inspired “Printing Hate,” an unprecedented, award-winning project from the college’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism that explored how white-owned newspapers fueled racial hate and violence throughout the Jim Crow era. Brown’s reporting was also prominent in two documentaries, PBS’ “Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten” and National Geographic’s “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer.”
Among other jobs at The Post, Brown has covered police, courts and education, and was a foreign correspondent. She was a staff writer in The Post’s Metro and Style sections and a staff writer for The Washington Post Magazine. Brown has earned national recognition for writing narratives about the middle class, the homeless, culture, race, Black history, urban gentrification, poverty and the environment. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Kansas.
Vasudevan came to Merrill College in 2017 as its assistant professor in visual communication. He is a critical scholar and filmmaker whose work examines within the intersections of media, cultural, journalism and design studies. He employs filmmaking, ethnographic methods such as field research and collaboration as well as textual analyses methods to understand how and why members of different social groups such as taxi drivers and artists produce media.
“Krishnan Vasudevan is one of the most versatile journalists/researchers at the college,” Dalglish said. “He continues to demonstrate excellence whether it be in a research presentation, documentary or one of Merrill College’s visual design courses.”
Vasudevan has published research in reputable scholarly publications such as Journalism Practice, Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies and Communication, Culture and Critique. He has presented his written and film scholarship at multiple conferences.
His most recent documentary film, “One Driver, One Mic,” has been an official selection to multiple film festivals, including Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Doc.London, Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, Immigration Film Fest and The Workers Unite Film Festival. The doc chronicles how a group of immigrant taxi drivers formed their own cooperative in Austin, Texas, to take on Uber, Lyft and the taxi industry.
Prior to his academic career, Vasudevan was a multimedia journalist and published extensively with The New York Times and Slate. He earned his Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin.
For more information, contact:
Josh Land
joshland@umd.edu
301-405-1321