Carolyn Hedges among this year’s cohort of Kopenhaver Center Fellows

Assistant professor of communications Carolyn Hedges has been named a 2021 Kopenhaver Center Fellow.

As part of the fellowship, she will participate in the workshop “Women Faculty Moving Forward: Leading the Future of Academia,” which precedes the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in August.

The Kopenhaver Center Fellow designation is given by the Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication at Florida International University and co-sponsored by the AEJMC Commission on the Status of Women.

The center was created to empower both women professionals and academics in all the fields of communication in order to develop visionaries and leaders who can make a difference in their communities and their profession. The intensive workshop is designed to assist new tenure-track professors navigate academic life, learn how to achieve success in the academy and prepare for possible leadership roles.

“As an early-career woman in academia, I am looking forward to expanding my network in the greater academic community,” Hedges says. “I am most looking forward to developing my leadership skills while working with others in our discipline to innovate our teaching practices, adapt to the demands of our soon-to-be post-pandemic lives as faculty members and, most importantly, draw on others’ experiences to inform my own.”

Hedges, who earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the Newhouse School, joined the Newhouse faculty in 2017 as the inaugural director of the school’s online master’s degree program. She recently earned the 2021-22 Teaching Recognition Award for Early Performance from Syracuse University’s Meredith Program.