Mary-Lou Galician, Associate Professor

Mary-Lou Galician (rhymes with “physician”) - The Original “Dr. FUN” - is a media literacy advocate and an award-winning mass media researcher, educator, and performer with more than 25 years of experience in print journalism, television, public relations, and advertising. As creator and presenter of the musical motivational program “FUN-dynamics! - The FUN-damentals of DYNAMIC Living,” Galician appeared nationwide to help people get “F-U-N,” her acronym for “Fired Up Now!” For decades she has been known nationally as “Dr. FUN” - which is also her ASU license plate.

She has been a faculty member at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication since 1983. Her “Sex, Love, & Romance in the Mass Media,” MCO 473, is a pioneering model used at universities around the nation.

Based on her extensive ground-breaking research of what she calls “The Romanticization of Love in the Mass Media,” she created her “Dr. FUN’s Mass Media Love Quiz©,” which she has administered on national network television, and her “Dr. Galician’s Prescriptions© for Healthy Coupleship.” Her Quiz and Prescriptions (online at www.RealisticRomance.com and cronkite.asu.edu/drfun/) form the core of her course and the first-of-its-kind textbook she wrote - “Sex, Love, & Romance in the Mass Media: Analysis & Criticism of Unrealistic Portrayals & Their Influence” (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), which was honored as a recommended resource by the Center for Media Literacy (CML) - as well as the core of her forthcoming trade book for the general public, “Dr. Galician’s Prescriptions© for Getting Real About Romance: How Mass Media Myths About Love Can Hurt You.” Scholars around the country have contributed 24 chapters addressing her “Quiz” and “Prescriptions” for her new book that Erlbaum will publish later this year, “Critical Thinking About Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media: Media Literacy Applications.”

Galician, who holds a federal trademark for “Realistic Romance®,” has been called the “Realistic Romance Guru.” Every year on Valentine’s Day, she announces her “Dr. FUN’s Stupid Cupid & Realistic Romance® Awards” for media portrayals of sex, love, and romance - an annual media literacy service project in which the public participates via ballots on her Web site. (Recipients of the annual awards are listed on her Web site.)

Galician is married to David Natharius, an expert in gender communication, conflict resolution, and visual communication, and together they offer Realistic Romance® workshops and video presentations.

Galician was also the guest editor of “High Time for ’Dis-illusioning’ Ourselves and Our Media: Media Literacy in the 21st Century” - American Behavioral Scientist’s September and October 2004 special double issue (Vol. 48, Nos. 1 & 2).

In addition, she was the editor of and a major contributor to the “Handbook of Product Placement in the Mass Media: New Strategies in Marketing Theory, Practice, Trends, and Ethics” (Haworth, 2004) and guest editor of the Journal of Promotion Management Spring 2004 special double issue (Vol. 10, Nos. 1 & 2) devoted to product placement in the mass media. The “Handbook” has also been translated into Russian, and that edition was published in Moscow by Et Cetera Publishing in December 2004.

Her research of television’s “good news and bad news” (which she calls “The American Dream and the Media Nightmare”) has been published in Journalism Quarterly, the Southwestern Mass Communication Journal and the Journal of Mass Media Ethics. She has directed the research of a great number of Master of Mass Communication degree candidates. She frequently appears on television and radio newscasts and talk shows and is cited in newspapers and magazines as a mass media expert, and she maintains an extensive speaking schedule as well.

Galician serves locally and nationally in a wide variety of civic, cultural, church, and professional activities. She was the founding national vice head and program chair of the Entertainment Studies Interest Group (ESIG) of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the Media Forum Planner of the 2003 national convention of the National Communication Association (NCA). She served on the national board of directors of Women in Communication, Inc. (WICI) and was twice named National Outstanding Adviser for her leadership of the ASU student chapter. The Outstanding Americans Foundation honored her as Woman of the Year.

She is one of eight journalism and mass communication professors in the nation to be named a 2005-2006 Journalism & Mass Communication Leadership Institute for Diversity (JLID) Fellow by the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the Association of Schools of Journalism & Mass Communication (ASJMC). And for 17 years, she has donated annual student scholarship in memory of her late mother, Evelyn-Nancy Galician.

An entertainer, media personality, and published writer since childhood, she attended the famous Professional Children’s School in New York City. She has held positions as a newspaper columnist, book editor, nighttime television talk show host/producer, and special events anchor, as well as national executive posts in advertising and marketing.

She was awarded a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Long Island University, and she holds a master’s degree from Syracuse University, where she was the University Fellow in Broadcasting. She earned her doctorate at Memphis State University (now University of Memphis ), with a clinical residency in human values and medical ethics at the University of Tennessee Center for the Health Sciences.

Her biography appears in “Who’s Who in America,” “Who’s Who in the World,” and “Who’s Who in Entertainment.”

For more information (and to take “Dr. FUN’s Mass Love Quiz©” and get her “Dr. Galician’s Prescriptions©”), visit www.RealisticRomance.com or Dr. Galician’s ASU website: http://cronkite.asu.edu/drfun/.