2003/2004 Award Winners for Distinguished Teaching

William Savage, Jr. and Craig L. LaMay have been selected to receive the 2003-4 SCS Distinguished Teaching Award. These distinguished members of the SCS faculty stimulated intellectual curiosity and growth, motivated students and used effective and inspiring teaching techniques.

Craig L. LaMay

Craig L. LaMay is a journalist and communications researcher. He is an assistant professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, where he has also served as associate dean, and he is a faculty associate at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research. He has also taught as an adjunct professor at Northwestern's School of Law.

LaMay is the former editor of the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Journal and a former newspaper reporter. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Time, the Federal Communications Law Journal, Communications and the Law and various other academic books and journals. Most recently he is the editor of Journalism and the Debate Over Privacy (Erlbaum, 2003) and co-author of Democracy on the Air, with Ellen Mickiewicz, Donald Browne and Charles Firestone (Duke, 2000). He is also a contributor to To Profit or Not to Profit: The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector (Cambridge, 1998); author of Television Autonomy and the State (Duke, 1997); and co-author with former FCC Chairman Newton Minow of Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment (Hill & Wang, 1995), which won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award for best legal book of the year.

LaMay's research and teaching areas are in journalism and democratization, First Amendment history, and broadcast regulation. He is currently at work on a book about media assistance as a feature of U.S. foreign aid, and in 2003 he served as a consultant to the U.S. Defense Department's Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC). He holds a B.A. in political science from Brown University and an M.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

William Savage, Jr.

Bill Savage earned his BA in English, summa cum laude, at Loyola University Chicago in 1986; he continued his studies at Northwestern with a Jacob Javits Fellowship, earning an MA in 1988 and the PhD in 1992. His dissertation focused on how certain material aspects of literary culture influence the process of reading narrative and the formation of canons in post-war American fiction. A lecturer in the English Department and a College Adviser in the Office of Undergraduate Studies and Advising of Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Savage has taught at SCS for over a decade, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. He is a Series Editor for the University of Chicago Press's new urban studies book series, Chicago Visions and Revisions, and his current research and writing focuses on Chicago author Nelson Algren, Chicago writing in general, and popular culture, especially baseball, sequential narrative, and animation.