Mary-Lou Galician, Associate Professor

Mary-Lou Galician is a media literacy advocate and award-winning mass media researcher, educator, author and performer who is frequently cited nationally and internationally as a media expert.

At ASU, thousands of students across all majors have learned to be wiser media consumers in her media literacy courses: MCO 120: Mass Media & Society and MCO 473: Sex, Love, & Romance in the Mass Media. MCO 473, which she created, is a pioneering model used at universities around the nation along with the research-based textbook she wrote, “Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media: Analysis and Criticism of Unrealistic Portrayals and Their Influence.” The textbook was honored as a recommended resource by the Center for Media Literacy. Scholars around the country contributed chapters for her companion book “Critical Thinking About Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media: Media Literacy Applications.”

Galician also was 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.

In addition, she is a frequently cited expert and consultant for international research projects on product placement in mass media. She was the guest editor of the Journal of Promotion Management Spring 2004 special double issue, which was devoted to product placement in the mass media. Galician also 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, ” the first product placement book in English. The book was translated into Russian and published in Russia. A separate version was published in a version for the Indian sub-continent.

Galician’s research, including her award-winning “Television’s Good News and Bad News: The American Dream and the Media Nightmare,” has appeared in Journalism Quarterly, Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, Popular Music and Society, Journalism Educator, Business Research Yearbook and Journal of Mass Media Ethics. She has directed the research of numerous Master of Mass Communication candidates and honors college theses.

She has participated 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 of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the Media Forum Planner of the 2003 national convention of the National Communication Association. She served on the national board of directors of Women in Communication Inc., and was twice named National Outstanding Adviser for her leadership of the ASU student WICI chapter. The Outstanding Americans Foundation honored her as Woman of the Year.

Galician currently is on the editorial board of the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture Project and on the advisory board of FactCheckED.org.

She was one of only eight journalism and mass communication professors in the nation to be named a 2005-2006 Journalism & Mass Communication Leadership Institute for Diversity Fellow by the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication and the Association of Schools of Journalism & Mass Communication.

And since 1989, she has donated to the Cronkite School an annual student scholarship in memory of her late mother, Evelyn-Nancy Galician.