Award-winning faculty member earns support as Fulbright Scholar

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An award-winning faculty member in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State has earned a Fulbright Scholar grant to conduct research and teach in Greece during the 2019-20 academic year.

Associate professor Russell Frank will spend the year teaching courses on media ethics and reporting of humanitarian crises in the international master’s program at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. Frank plans to report on the migrant crisis in Greece and have his students do the same. He’ll also conduct research about journalists’ coverage of the crisis.

Frank teaches news writing, feature writing, news media ethics and the literature of journalism at Penn State. He worked for newspapers in California and Pennsylvania as a reporter and editor for 12 years before joining the University faculty in 1998.

Frank recently won first place for commentary in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Keystone Chapter Best in Journalism Contest. His columns, which appear on StateCollege.com, were voted best in a division that featured columnists from large media outlets in Pennsylvania, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose columnists were second and third in the division.

A collection of Frank’s columns, titled "Among the Woo People: A Survival Guide for Living in a College Town," was published in fall 2017 by the Penn State University Press. He also is the author of a book about internet folklore titled "Newslore." His research articles and essays have been published in Nieman Reports, News Media Ethics, Quill, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Western Folklore, Journal of American Folklore, New Media and Society, Contemporary Legend, Journalism, Rural Sociology, and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator. He has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers.

He is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, the American Folklore Society, the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies, the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Frank participated in the Fulbright Program during the 2012-13 academic year when he taught at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv in western Ukraine.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Since its inception in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given approximately 310,000 students, scholars, teachers artists and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. 

The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide.