Office: 342 Lang Hall, Department of Communication and Media
Phone: 273-5972
Email: fabos@uni.edu
Education: Ph.D. Language Literacy and Culture, University of Iowa, M.A., Telecommunication Arts, University of Michigan
Research Interests: Critical literacy, media literacy, digital archiving, cultural memory studies
Dr. Bettina Fabos specializes in media, visual literacy, digital archiving, and digital storytelling, and has been a leader in media literacy pedagogy for twenty years. As a young journalist working for the Daily Hampshire Gazette and New England Monthly magazine in the late 1980s, she was fascinated by issues of power, objectivity, and representation in media storytelling. She pursued a master’s degree in Telecommunication Arts at the University of Michigan, immersing herself in issues of representation (e.g., portrayals of Olympic figuring skating athletes), and developing video art projects that addressed topics such as sexual harassment (Lessons), gender roles (Secretary is a Female Word and Guess What? Mum’s Come to Visit?), and wedding consumerism (Betty Bride)--winning national awards for her video work. While at Michigan, Bettina also established multiple video showcases that highlighted important emerging video artwork created by women and LBGTQ+ producers. As a video producer, Bettina developed an astute understanding for visual communication and aesthetics: how visual framing, color, and narrative structure empower the media producer to convey stories, meaning, and ideological constructs.
In 1998, Bettina joined her mentor, Richard Campbell, with Christopher Martin (professor of Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa), in revising Campbell’s textbook Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age, the first introduction to mass communication textbook to take a critical media literacy approach to the media. By the early 2000s, Media and Culture was the leading textbook in mass communication, and it has set the standard for media literacy pedagogy to this day. Now in its 13th edition, the textbook is used in mass communication survey classes across the U.S. She also co-authors two additional textbooks, Media Essentials (now in its 5th edition) and Media in Society (2013). Bettina’s book Wrong Turn on the Information Superhighway: Education and the Commercialization of the Internet (based on her dissertation) champions high-quality, nonprofit educational content on the web and offers a critical literacy approach to web content. She is active in the Creative Commons and OER communities.
Beyond media literacy pedagogy, Bettina is an active producer of interactive media content, specializing in interactive timelines. She co-founded Fortepan Iowa in 2015, a UNI-based digital archive of amateur photographs on 20th century Iowa life that uses a timeline interface to tell the pictorial history of Iowa. She is also project director of an exhaustive interactive timeline on Hungarian history (Proud and Torn: A Visual Memoir of Hungarian History) that uniquely combines photomontage, public history, and graphic memoir to make the complicated story of modern Hungary easily understood.
Bettina joined the University of Northern Iowa faculty in 2002 and is a founding member of the interactive digital studies program. Bettina teaches courses in digital culture, interactive digital communication, digital visualization, and media power and representation.
She completed her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Iowa. At UIowa, Bettina was a Presidential Fellow, a Spencer Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize.