About

I am an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication, Film and Journalism at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

I teach, write and think about media narratives ranging from crime and incarceration to sports fandom.

My current project focuses on soccer fanzines in the UK in the 1980s and 90s. Before there were football fan-produced blogs, websites and podcasts, there were fanzines – hundreds of them across the UK – connected to football teams large and small. They came to life in the 1980s and 1990s as football seemed to be dying, beset by incidents of violence, decreasing attendance and bad press.

Some (relatively) recent work and mentions:

Appearance in No Way Home, a documentary about a woman’s journey after the murder of her brother and the sentencing of her son to life without parole for an unrelated crime.

“I know the ‘murderers’ from Oz’s ads. They are no menace to society,” op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 3, 2022.

“There’s Urgency Here: A Pedagogy of Discomfort in a Prison Basement,” an article my friend Felix Rosado and I wrote about our class Crime, Justice and Media. The class includes visits to a maximum security prison outside of Philadelphia to meet, talk and bond with men serving death by incarceration sentences.

I am also interested (obsessed) with soccer. I became fascinated with the culture, community and history of the game while living abroad as a reporter for a decade or so and in Spring 2021 taught a new course: The Beautiful Game: How Soccer Explains Media.

My BA is from Temple University and my Ph.D. is from Indiana University.

I was a reporter and editor for The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse and newspapers in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the British West Indies, Alaska and Williamsport, Pennsylvania. I covered everything from the Iditarod and the world luge championships to Champions League soccer and post-Soviet nation building.