Katherine Foss, PhD

Katherine A. Foss (Ph.D., Mass Communication, University of Minnesota), is professor of Media Studies in the School of Journalism & Strategic Media at Middle Tennessee University and an award-winning scholar. Her research broadly examines facets of health communication, including the history of media and epidemics, breastfeeding discourse, and parasocial interactionism and grief. Previous studies have addressed children’s media literacy, gender and victimization, hearing loss, and other topics related to entertainment media.

She is the author of Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), a book that encompasses more than 200 years of media coverage of epidemics. Past books also include Breastfeeding and Media: Exploring Conflicting Discourses That Threaten Public Health (2017, Palgrave Macmillan), and Television and Health Responsibility in an Age of Individualism (2014, Lexington Books). She has also produced more than two dozen publications that include op-eds, essays, reviews, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, and peer-reviewed articles in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Health Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and other journals. Foss also served as the editor for The Graduate Student Guidebook: From Orientation to Tenure Track (forthcoming, Rowman & Littlefield), Beyond Princess Culture: Gender and Children’s Marketing (2019, Peter Lang Publishing) and Demystifying the Big House: Exploring Prison Experience and Media Representations (2018, Southern Illinois Press University). 

She serves as the on the Board of Directors for the Association of Education in Journalism & Mass Communication and on the editorial boards of Health Communication and the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture. She was an invited speaker at the 2012 Great Nurse-In, a breastfeeding advocacy event held on the West Lawn of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. She also won the 2013 Covert Award and the 2012 James W. Carey Media Research Award and the for her co-authored article (with Dr. Kathy Forde) published in Book History.