Radhika Parameswaran (UI SJMC Ph.D., 1997)

Radhika Parameswaran grew up in the city of Hyderabad (population of 11 million in 2024) in South India. Her father worked as a professor of psychology (he founded the department) at Osmania University—a large and well-known state university—located in Hyderabad. Her mother, a professor in education (child development), worked at a few different colleges but was also an entrepreneur who started her own elementary school based in a Montessori approach to children’s education (hands-on learning, self-directed activity, and creative play). 

The university provided housing to faculty, so Parameswaran was fortunate to grow up on a beautiful green college campus in an otherwise crowded and busy city. She attended a convent/Catholic all-girls school along with her younger sister and many other girls from her campus neighborhood. Dressed in identical uniforms with ties and badges and tightly braided hair, these girls walked together back and forth every day to school and their homes. From first to tenth grades, schoolwork was very demanding, with lots of homework and frequent tests. But school life also included plenty of laughter, deep friendships, and exchanges of delicious home-cooked food during lunch breaks when everyone sat in big circles under shady trees. 

During her college years in India, Parameswaran worked as a freelance journalist, writing columns and feature stories on a range of topics—arts & entertainment, education, and lifestyle. She enjoyed interviewing sources and writing articles for local newspapers in Hyderabad. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism at Osmania University and then worked as an editor for the book publisher Orient Longman. She met Professor Douglas Ann Newsom at Osmania University when Professor Newsom was in Hyderabad on a Fulbright fellowship. With the encouragement and support of Professor Newsom, who worked at Texas Christian University (TCU), she applied for a master’s degree in media studies at TCU and soon found herself in 1991 in the city of Fort Worth, Texas, in the United States.

During her graduate program at TCU, Parameswaran interned at the book publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, an enriching professional opportunity that led to a full-time position as an editorial associate at the same company after graduation. Parameswaran met Professor Ken Starck, who was the director of University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC), at a national conference where she presented a paper based on her master’s thesis research. Professor Starck and Parameswaran’s thesis adviser, Professor Anantha Babbili, an alumnus of the SJMC, persuaded her to apply to the PhD program at the SJMC. 

Parameswaran was stunned when her PhD application was accepted with full funding. She really enjoyed her editorial work at Harcourt Brace and developed strong friendships with a few colleagues there, but the magnetic pull of studying at a large midwestern public university located in a beautiful college town proved irresistible. Thus began a new chapter in her life in 1993 as a Hawkeye, with days that were replete with lush cornfields surrounding Iowa City, bitter cold Iowa winters, eclectic restaurants and sports bars, the Prairie Lights bookstore, stimulating public talks, and many hours spent in the graduate lounge of the old SJMC building. The graduate lounge—with its orange shag carpeting and open cubicles—became the center of Parameswaran’s routines. She forged deep friendships with her peers in that space, and she continues to reminisce about the lounge to this day with her fellow Hawkeyes when they meet at conferences. 

With the guidance and support of her adviser, Professor Carolyn Dyer, and committee members, Professors Sue Lafky, Judy Polumbaum, John Soloski, and Bonnie Sunstein, she completed and defended her dissertation in 1997. While Professor Dyer gave Parameswaran complete freedom to pursue her own path, Dyer also provided insightful, detailed, and nurturing guidance. Every page of Parameswaran’s dissertation was read carefully with Dyer’s signature green ink marks that offered both macro-level commentary and granular edits. 

Parameswaran’s teaching mentor, Professor Dan Berkowitz, introduced her to most everything she knows today about teaching, from writing good exam questions to constructive grading, putting together informative lectures and group activities, empathizing with and helping undergraduates succeed. With good humor and patience, Professor Berkowitz also helped Parameswaran with all her nonstop professional development questions—how to secure a graduate solo instructor teaching opportunity, prepare for a conference presentation, navigate the job market, and perform well at campus interviews. 

Professor Philip Lutgendorf in the South Asian Studies program introduced her to faculty and colleagues from across campus working on South Asia, treated her to numerous lunches, invited her to give her very first full-fledged talk, and helped her network at her first South Asia conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Parameswaran stays connected to the incredibly warm and brilliant “Philip-ji” to this day. Due to the SJMC’s excellent training in research and teaching, Parameswaran was incredibly fortunate to land a tenure-track assistant professor position in 1997 at the School of Journalism, Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB). Thus began yet another new midwestern chapter in her life as a Hoosier. 

Parameswaran’s dissertation took an ethnographic approach to investigate the popularity of Mills & Boon romance novels (imported from the United Kingdom) among one group of young, Hindu, middle- and upper-class women in the city of Hyderabad in South India. Her analysis of romance reading followed the tradition of feminist cultural studies scholars—Janice Radway, Elizabeth Bird, Andrea Press, and Lana Rakow—who also relied on ethnographic methods to investigate women's responses to the media. Working on her research as an assistant professor at IUB, Parameswaran prioritized converting her dissertation into published research. Her dissertation yielded three refereed articles, two in the Journal of Communication and a third in Qualitative Inquiry. 

Parameswaran has stayed at IU Bloomington since 1997 and became a full professor in 2011. She was nominated for and earned a campus-wide endowed professorship in 2017 when she was appointed to be a Herman B Wells Endowed Professor (Class of 1950). Her Hoosier life in idyllic Bloomington includes the following: beautiful orangey-yellow fall colors, long walks in city and adjoining state parks, fresh produce at farmers’ markets, the splendid university gym, an incredible variety of ethnic restaurants, delicious local ice cream, film screenings at one of the best university-owned theaters (IU Cinema), and a rich collegial and intellectual life as a faculty member with affiliate appointments in the India Studies and Cultural Studies programs and the Gender Studies department.

Parameswaran’s professional journey at IUB so far includes two stints in formal university administration. She served as chair of the Journalism department in The Media School from 2015 to 2019 and assisted the former stand-alone School of Journalism’s transition into a department in the recently founded Media School that also houses the former Telecommunications and Communication & Culture departments. She also served as The Media School’s associate dean from 2021 to 2024, working with two deans, first with Interim Dean Walter Gantz and then with Dean David Tolchinsky, who was hired as the permanent dean in 2023. 

Parameswaran’s work in administration exposed her to diverse colleagues from across the university, facilitated opportunities to work with talented staff at the school, and yielded valuable behind-the-scenes glimpses of university operations. She enjoyed learning about finance and budgets in her administrative roles, and she thanked her mathematics teacher from high school almost every day for giving her the foundational literacy that she could build on to understand this new financial world.

By 2024, 27 years after she left University of Iowa and joined IUB, Parameswaran had authored or co-authored the following: a 2013 Wiley-Blackwell edited encyclopedic volume on global audience studies, two monographs in Journalism & Communication Monographs, 27 peer-reviewed journal articles (five reprinted as book chapters), six non-refereed essays, including two on Kamala Harris and her bi-racial identity, and 13 book chapters. Some selected publications are provided in references. 

The first monograph article that Parameswaran published in 2001 focuses on the 1996 Miss World pageant, held in Bengaluru, a cosmopolitan city in South India. The pageant proved highly controversial due to pageant protests by religious leaders, conservative women's groups, feminist activists, and political parties. Parameswaran’s ethnographic fieldwork based in Mumbai and Bengaluru explores perceptions of televised global beauty pageants among business and media professionals in India who organized, sponsored, and supported the Miss World beauty contest. 

The second 2009 monograph (co-authored with Kavitha Cardoza) examines the cultural politics of gender, nation, beauty, and skin color in Indian magazine advertisements and television commercials for skin-lightening/fairness cosmetics and personal care products. This research—part textual analysis and part political economy critique—situates advertising's compact stories of ideal femininity within the sociology of colorism's transnational links to hierarchies of race, gender, caste, ethnicity, and class and also the rapid economic growth in the skin-lightening cosmetics sector in India, following economic liberalization.

Parameswaran is a recipient of the International Communication Association’s Teresa Award for outstanding feminist scholarship and a two-time recipient of the Journalism department’s Gretchen Kemp Award for outstanding teaching. Among her most recent awards is a 2020 top faculty paper award from the Feminist and Gender Studies division of the National Communication Association and a 2021 campus-wide Trustees Teaching Award. She has appeared on and been interviewed by a wide range of news and popular media outlets (CNN, Al Jazeera, The Juggernaut, and Web MD among others). She was a visiting research professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania; Faculty-in-Residence at University of Colorado, Boulder; and an invited expert at the National Communication Association’s Doctoral Honors Seminar. She was inducted into her alma mater, the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication Hall of Fame, in 2021.

She served as editor of Communication, Culture and Critique, an official journal of the International Communication Association, from 2014 to 2016. She collaborated with Professor Leslie Steeves (University of Oregon) to supervise the journal’s publication of a special issue on Africa, media, and globalization, an initiative she counts as among her most significant contributions to global media scholarship. Her past and current service on journal editorial boards includes the International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, Asian Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Monographs, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. She is currently serving as an elected member of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Research Committee.

Counting current graduate student advisees, she has served as adviser to 18 graduate students (MA & PhD), and her work as a committee member on theses and dissertation committees includes more than 30 committees of students from such disciplines as gender studies, history, anthropology, and folklore. At the undergraduate level, Parameswaran teaches courses on media and society, media globalization, advertising and consumer culture, and race, gender, and media. As an instructor who is committed to helping students connect critical thinking with media practice and production, she enjoys designing assignments that ask her undergraduate students to apply conceptual and research-based knowledge to practical and professional work. For example, when students read a book on consumer culture history, their assignment asks them to work with a peer (in teams of two) to create a short script for a podcast interview with the book author. Students then enact the interview in class, and the week when students bring their scripts alive through simulated podcast performances is always a fun and educational experience for all! 

Parameswaran has had a rewarding and fulfilling career as a professor at IUB. She credits her splendid education at the SJMC and other University of Iowa departments (women’s studies, anthropology, South Asian studies) for her professional achievements. She also remains grateful to her parents for the numerous inspiring ways in which they quietly and effectively modeled (through their actions rather than top-down lectures) how to be ethical, principled, and kind academics and human beings. 

Her father, the original Prof. Parameswaran, also bequeathed an appreciation for punctuality, a great sense of self-deprecating humor (that also critiqued social hierarchies), classical South Indian music, and a down-to-earth approach (no pomposity or stuffiness allowed) to life. From her mother, an avid reader of books and newspapers, she learned how to prioritize mind over matter; love words, stories, and poetry; enjoy spicy stuffed peppers and salty-sugary mango juice; and to always recognize her own class and caste privileges as she was growing up in a country that had a vast population of poor and marginalized citizens. Parameswaran shall forever be a dedicated hybrid Hawkeye-Hoosier Indian American citizen of the world!

References

Parameswaran, R., & Cardoza, K. (2009). Melanin on the margins: Advertising and the cultural politics of fair/light/white beauty in India. Journalism & Communication Monographs. 11 (3), 213-274. [first author]

Parameswaran, R. (2001). Global media events in India: Contests over beauty, gender, and nation. Journalism & Communication Monographs, 3 (2), 53-105.

Parameswaran, R. (2001). Feminist media ethnography in India: Exploring power, gender, and culture in the field. Qualitative Inquiry, 7 (1), 69-103.

Parameswaran, R. (2002). Reading fictions of romance: Gender, sexuality, and nationalism in postcolonial India. Journal of Communication, 52 (4), 832-851.

Parameswaran, R. (1999). Western romance fiction as English language media in postcolonial India. Journal of Communication, 49 (2), 84-105.