Bonnie Brennen (UI Ph.D. 1993)

Bonnie Brennen’s fascination with journalism began in 1965 when she took a journalism class in junior high school and was introduced to the world of news. She wrote for her high school newspaper, volunteered for a local underground publication, and developed a lifelong habit of reading at least two newspapers daily. As an undergraduate journalism major at California State University, Northridge, Brennen worked as a reporter, copy editor, news editor, and editor on the student newspaper, the Daily Sundial. In her senior year, Brennen served as a metro news intern reporter for the Los Angeles Times. In her free time, she tried to understand the major cultural changes taking place in society.

Following graduation, Brennen worked for a local community newspaper, a graphic arts company, and later transitioned into corporate communications. After the birth of her two children, she began the Mass Communication graduate program at California State University, Fullerton. Under the mentorship of graduate director Dean Mills, she took courses in communication theory, qualitative methods, ethics, history, and American studies. Brennen became intrigued with cultural approaches to media and delved into how issues of media consolidation and press freedom impacted labor. She became Rick Pullen’s teaching assistant and felt fortunate that he shared many of his teaching strategies with her. Brennen found Professor Pullen’s strategies for engaging students enlightening and incorporated them throughout her academic career.

While at Fullerton, graduate faculty members encouraged Brennen to apply to Ph.D. programs. In 1989, she began the doctoral program at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Brennen considered her time at the University of Iowa four of the best years of her life. The doctoral program was an excellent fit, and she gained a wealth of knowledge by engaging with internationally diverse peers. As a native of Los Angeles, she appreciated the changing seasons, and her children thrived in the family-friendly environment of Iowa City. Before coming to Iowa, Brennen had often been told not to overthink things, and to stop asking so many questions, yet the University of Iowa faculty encouraged her to think more deeply, question assumptions, and to try to make connections between theories, concepts, the communication process, and issues and concerns in contemporary society. 

Under Hanno Hardt’s guidance, Brennen learned that engaging with research could be exciting, and she began to solidify a theoretical framework from cultural and critical theories, studying the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, James Carey, Louis Althusser, and Erich Fromm. Professor Hardt not only mentored her through the Iowa doctoral program but helped guide her through her research career, which resulted in their joint publication of three edited books: Newsworkers: Towards a History of the Rank and File, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1995, Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1999, and the American Journalism History Reader, published by Routledge in 2010.

As a doctoral student, Brennen edited three issues of Iowa’s Journal of Communication Inquiry: A Freedom of Expression special issue, a general issue, and a theme issue on Cultural Materialism. Her dissertation committee was chaired by Professor Hardt and included School of Journalism and Mass Communication faculty John Erickson, Jeff Smith, Al Talbot, and Tom Lewis from Literary Theory. Brennen’s dissertation, “Peasantry of the Press: A History of American Newsworkers from Novels, 1919-1938,” combined her interests in cultural studies and twentieth-century journalism history. Brennen’s dissertation drew on Raymond Williams’s theory of Cultural Materialism, which considered novels (and other cultural artifacts) as part of the actual lived experience of people living at a specific time and place. Her dissertation combined academic research on journalists during the interwar era with insights from 100 novels about journalists written during that period, resulting in a cultural history of the material conditions of newsroom labor. 

Brennen’s first full-time academic position was as Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at the State University of New York, Geneseo, in the fall of 1993, where she developed her skills teaching journalism writing classes and worked on her research. The university’s proximity to Rochester, New York, former home to two Gannett Newspapers, The Times Union and the Democrat & Chronicle, afforded her the opportunity to conduct an oral history project with journalists who had worked on one or both newspapers during the twentieth century. The insights from this project, For the Record: An Oral History of Rochester, New York Newsworkers, was published by Fordham University Press in 2001.

In 1996, Brennen joined the School of Mass Communication at Virginia Commonwealth University teaching classes in mass communication theory, film theory, and mass media and society to students at The Ad Center (currently The Brand Center). In 1998, she was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. From 1999-2004, Brennen was a tenured Associate Professor, News Editorial Department, School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Columbia, where she mentored students, supervised theses and dissertations, and taught courses in social and cultural theory, journalism history, and qualitative research methods. 

Brennen became a tenured Professor and Chair of the Department of Journalism at Temple University in 2004 and was named Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs in 2005. As Temple’s vice provost, she advised the provost on all faculty matters for the 1,682 full-time faculty and provided guidance to deans and other administrators on faculty issues and concerns.

In 2008, Brennen was named the Nieman Professor of Journalism at Marquette University’s Diederich College of Communication. During ten years as the Neiman Professor, she focused on research, brought in Nieman speakers, and held conferences on journalism and democracy, politics and ethics, data visualization, and the future of journalism. She taught courses on media, technology and culture, storytelling in public life, journalism history, ethics, and qualitative research methods. In 2018, she became Professor Emerita at Marquette.

At the beginning of Brennen’s academic career, there was considerable disagreement about the value of using qualitative research methods for media-related research. Yet, she noticed that as her career continued, peer interest in qualitative research methods increased significantly. Existing journals began publishing more qualitative research; some new journals focused exclusively on it; graduate students sought out her qualitative methods classes; and faculty requests for her qualitative research methods syllabi grew. Responding to growing interest, Brennen wrote the first edition of Qualitative Research Methods for Media Studies, which was published in 2012 by Routledge. The book addressed common qualitative research methods and grounded them in theoretical, cultural, and historical contexts. Each new edition has featured updated research in qualitative methods and trends in the field. The fourth edition, published in 2025, addressed recent technological changes that impacted qualitative research, along with newly developed qualitative methodologies, including a new chapter on using qualitative research in a time of generative Artificial Intelligence.

Throughout her research career, Brennen has written and/or edited eight academic books and one novel. She has also published 38 peer-reviewed journal articles, 15 book chapters, 5 encyclopedia articles, 14 book reviews, and 11 newsletter articles. and has given more than 100 peer-reviewed and invited academic presentations.

Since 2018, Brennen has served as Editor-in-Chief of Journalism Practice, an international journal published by Taylor & Francis. From 2010-2018, she was the Series Editor for Diederich Studies in Media and Communication, published by Marquette University Press. Brennen was Associate Editor of Journalism and Communication Monographs from 2004-2008, and a guest editor for a special issue on “Journalism and Labor” published in Spring 2005 by Javnost: The Public: Journal of the European Institute for Communication and Culture as well as a guest editor for a 1998 theme issue of American Journalism on “Labor and Newswork.”

Recently, Brennen reflected on her academic career and realized that sixty years after she took her first journalism class, she remained fascinated by journalism and continued to ask too many questions. And she still reads at least two newspapers each day and continues, without much success, to try to understand the cultural changes taking place in society.