By Allyson Mann
tiny@uga.edu
Horace Newcomb has been selected as the new director of the George Foster Peabody Awards, which recognize outstanding achievement in broadcasting and cable. As director, Newcomb will become Lambdin Kay Distinguished Professor for the Peabody Awards at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where the program is housed. Currently he is the F.J. Heney Centennial Professor in the department of radio-television-film at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Horace Newcomb is widely regarded as one of the most prominent founders of academic media criticism and television studies in the United States,” says Leonard N. Reid, Grady College interim dean. “The college could not have recruited a more qualified director.”
A member of the Peabody National Advisory Board from 1990 to 1995, Newcomb joined a distinguished group of media practitioners, critics, scholars, viewers and listeners to make the final selections each year of recipients of program and individual awards.
“I’ve always described that time on the Peabody Board as one of the best intellectual experiences of my career and as an outstanding opportunity to participate in public life,” Newcomb says. “I’m honored and extremely pleased to become a part of the program on a day-to-day basis.”
Newcomb brings an encyclopedic knowledge of broadcasting to the Peabody Awards, says Alison Alexander, professor and head of the department of telecommunications. “Dr. Newcomb has a lifelong interest in celebrating the best of electronic media,” she says. “He is a perfect match with Peabody, and his contributions will enhance the college’s telecommunications program significantly.”
Newcomb is an internationally renowned media scholar with more than 30 years of experience in higher education. He is editor of The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television, a three-volume reference work containing more than 1,000 entries on major people, programs and topics related to television in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The tome was created during his tenure as curator for the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago from 1994 to 1996. A native of Jackson, Miss., he earned a Ph.D. and M.A. at the University of Chicago and a B.A. at Mississippi College. |
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