From her official University of Texas biography:
Rivas-Rodriguez received her Ph.D. as a Freedom Forum doctoral fellow from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. Her dissertation, "Brown Eyes on the Web: A U.S. Latino Newspaper Site on the Internet," included a content analysis of a Latino Web newspaper as well as one of the mainstream newspapers in the same market. Rivas-Rodriguez received her master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 1977. She received a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976.
She has more than 17 years of daily news experience, mostly as a reporter for the Boston Globe, WFAA-TV in Dallas and the Dallas Morning News. Her first job was as a copy editor for UPI in Dallas. Her most recent professional work was for the Morning News state desk as bureau chief of the border bureau, based in El Paso, covering border states.
Her research interests include the intersection of oral history and journalism, U.S. Latinos and the news media, both as producers of news and as consumers. Since 1999, Rivas-Rodriguez has spearheaded the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project, which has collected interviews with over 450 men and women throughout the country. Stories based on those interviews have appeared in a newspaper dedicated to the project. The project has several other components: a conference, an edited volume of academic manuscripts, a play (through Arizona State University Public Events and the University of Texas' Performing Arts Center), documentary film with educational materials, a general interest book, and a video, audio tape and photographic archive. The project is self-supporting and has enjoyed support from the Austin American-Statesman and the San Antonio Express-News, and has received financial contributions from several foundations, corporations and hundreds of individual donors.
Rivas-Rodriguez was on the committee that organized and founded the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in 1982. She began two of the NAHJ's most successful student projects: a convention newspaper produced by college students and professionals and a nationwide high school writing contest. The convention newspaper has become the model for most other industry organizations (ASNE, NABJ, AJA) as a way to develop mentoring relationships and to train students.
She is the Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Recent Courses: J320D Intermediate Reporting, J335 Narrative Journalism, J349T.7 Oral History as Journalism, J395 Covering the U.S.-Mexico Border and J395.1 Professional Writing for Journalists.
Publications: "Brown Eyes on the Web: An Alternative U.S. Latino Newspaper on the Internet" (New York: Routledge), 2003. She was also the editor of "Mexican Americans and World War II", an edited volume (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming).
From her official University of Texas biography:
