Ryan Rendleman

Daily Egyptian

Two new department chairs have accepted positions in SIUC's College of Mass Communication and Media Arts and are awaiting final approval from the Board of Trustees.

John Hochheimer, an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College in New York, will be chairman of the Department of Radio-Television. Deborah Tudor, an associate professor of journalism at DePaul University in Chicago, will be chairwoman of the Department of Cinema and Photography, said Manjunath Pendakur, dean of the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts. Both will begin their work this summer.

Department chairs are responsible for everything that occurs in their particular departments, including teaching, research and service programs. The college began searches for positions in fall 2004, but were unsuccessful. Searches resumed in the summer of 2005 to replace current chairs R. William Rowley in cinema and photography, and Phylis Johnson in radio-television.

Johnson and Rowley will both step down after their terms and will continue teaching as faculty in the departments.

Pendakur said the additions of the new chairs will benefit the college and students in many ways.

"They're bringing experiences from a larger national and international level, which will help the students in looking at the media issues from a global perspective," he said.

Hochheimer said he got his start working in media by writing a sports column for a local newspaper in New Jersey. His academic career began at Boston University.

After leaving the station, he said he worked at WBCN, a large rock station in Boston, where he met famous musicians, such as Jerry Garcia, Elton John, B.B. King, Rod Stewart and David Bowie.

Eventually, after a stint as a driver on movie sets in California, Hochheimer said he decided he wanted to be a college professor.

"I wanted to do something that would use my brains a little more," he said.

Hochheimer earned his doctorate at Stanford University in 1986 and said he set up Ithaca College's journalism program in 1991. He has also worked for independent radio stations, covering social movements in Europe, the United States and other parts of the world.

Hochheimer said he hopes to dismantle the idea of "town and gown" and get students involved in the community so they can see the connections between their lives and the lives of others in society.

"I want to help students overcome the false barrier of town and gown because the world of town is real," he said.

The cinema and photography department's new leader, Tudor, grew up in Western Kentucky. She said her interest in cinema was the result of her early exposure to photography.

"My parents gave me my first camera when I was about 10," Tudor said. "When I was in college, I realized that film was even more interesting to me than photography so I switched my major to cinema studies."

Tudor received her doctorate from Northwestern University and has written a book on sports and Hollywood and is also working to finish another book about British and Australian cinema, Pendakur said.

Tudor has taught at DePaul University in Chicago for nine years.

In addition to being interested in cinema and photography, Tudor said she enjoys hiking and being outdoors and is looking forward to coming to a more rural environment.

"I'm also an outdoorsy kind of person, I like to hike," she said. "So coming to a place that's much less urban than where I've been living for 20 years did have a great deal of appeal. It's a pretty area."

Tudor said she hopes to be an asset to the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts.

"I think Carbondale has a great program over there," she said. "I think that SIU is uniquely positioned to become even more of a star university than it already is."