Faculty | Adjunct Faculty | Affiliate Faculty | Emeriti/ae Faculty

Patricia Aufderheide, Professor, School of Communication, holds the B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, all in history, from the University of Minnesota. She directs the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication and teaches in the Visual Media Division. She has published many, many books and articles on a remarkably wide range of topics, ranging from the experiences of Arab-Americans to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to property rights in an age of digital communication. She is an editor and writer for In These Times. She has won many prestigious national awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and, recently, the McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy. She has also won many campus awards, including Scholar-Teacher of the Year.

Philip Brenner, Professor, School of International Service, holds a BA in History from Columbia University and MA and PhD degrees in Political Science from The Johns Hopkins University. His many publications include Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) co-authored with James G. Blight, The Cuba Readers (Grove, 1989) co-edited with William Leogrande, From Confrontation to Negotiation: U.S. Relations with Cuba (Westview, 1988). In 2006 he served on the Department's Search Committee for a Historian of U.S. Foreign Relations.

Richard J. (Joe) Dent is Associate Professor of Anthropology at American University. Richard J. Dent holds the PhD in Anthropology from American University. He is has published three books or monographs, with a fourth book forthcoming, 15 book chapters, 6 articles in refereed journals, as well as many, many other publications. He has received almost 2 million dollars in grants to support his research and that of his students. An archeologist, his geographic focus is the archeology of North America, specifically the Middle Atlantic region. He and his students have worked extensively on both the prehistory and history of the Chesapeake Bay area, most recently excavating 18th and 19th century sites in Philadelphia. He is a former chair of the Department of Anthropology and has worked with a number of our majors, including those in the Public History program.

Helen Langa is Associate Professor of Art History. She earned her MA and PhD in American and Modern Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she worked extensively with historians Eric Foner and Jacqueline Dowd Hall. She is the author of eight articles and a recently published book, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in the 1930s (California, 2004). In 2005 she served as a member of the Department’s Search Committee for a historian of early American and gender history.

Leonard Steinhorn is Professor in the School of Communication and Director of the Public Communication Division. He earned his BA in History at Vassar and was a John Higham student at The Johns Hopkins University, where he completed an M. and all but his dissertation. From 1983 to 1995 he held a series of positions in the area of political communication, including Director of Research for People for the American Way and Vice President and Senior Counsel for Widmeyer Communications. He joined the AU School of Communication in 1995. He is the author of two historically grounded studies, By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (Dutton, 1999), which he co-authored with Barbara Diggs-Brown, and The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). He has also published a textbook on public relations and has written extensively for newspapers and magazine.

Roger Streitmatter, Associate Dean and Professor, School of Communication, earned his PhD in history at American University. His six books include Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Farber and Farber, 1995), Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok (Free Press, 1998) and Voice of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America (Columbia, 2001). He serves on many professional boards, including the American Journalism Historians Association, the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the American Historical Association’s Committee on Gay and Lesbian History. He has recently served on an AU History Department dissertation committee.

* From the Faculty Manual: An affiliate faculty appointment recognizes a formal arrangement between a faculty member and a department or teaching unit outside that of the faculty member’s primary appointment.

Photo: The Quadriga on the Brandenberg Gate, Berlin, Germany.