bc's bio

Brian Carroll
Chair
Professor
Department of Communication
Berry College

biographical

Brian Carroll is a professor of communication and chair of the Communication Department at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. In his teaching, he specializes in the First Amendment, media law, visual rhetoric, sports communication, and digital media. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication in June 2003 under the guidance of Dr. Margaret Blanchard. Carroll was also an adjunct professor at UNC Chapel Hill, teaching the online masters course, Writing for Digital Media (JoMC711), from 2002 to 2014, and he is a consultant to businesses, non-profits and NGOs on the subjects of writing and editing for digital media, digital publishing, and social media integration.

Carroll earned his B.A. with a concentration in business, also from UNC Chapel Hill, in 1987. He earned his master's in political science and public affairs from UNC Greensboro in 1992. His research interests include communication technology; law and policy; media convergence; online community; the black press and professional baseball, and Shakespeare and nationalism.

In April 2006, he was given Berry College's Teaching Excellence Award for "outstanding leadership and resourcefulness in teaching." In May 2003, Carroll was named the UNC School of Journalism & Mass Communication's outstanding Ph.D. student, the same year he was awarded the Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, a campus-wide honor. He has won several awards for his research, including the American Journalism Historians Association's "outstanding paper on a minorities topic" four times (2001, 2003, 2004 & 2011), and the McFarland-SABR Research Award in 2007. His first book, When to Stop the Cheering? The Black Press, the Black Community and the Integration of Professional Baseball, was published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis in 2007 and was named a finalist for SABR's Seymour Medal. It was also named Book-of-the-Year by the Negro Leagues Committee of the Society of American Baseball Research.

Carroll's second book, Writing for Digital Media, also from Routledge, published in April 2010. The 5th edition is due out in first quarter 2023. The book teaches students how to write effectively for digital audiences by among other things, providing an understanding of the ways that the Internet has blurred traditional roles of media producer, consumer, publisher, and reader.

Carroll has published approximately 35 peer-reviewed journal articles, in publications such as the Journal of Interactive Marketing; Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies; Into the Blogosphere; Baseball and American Culture; Journalism History; American Journalism; the Journal of Communication and Social Change; Black Ball; Journal of the Wooden O; the Journal of Sports Media; Visual Communication Quarterly; and the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture.

Before joining the professorate, Carroll was for 15 years a reporter, photographer, editor and managing editor, for various publications, including the (Greensboro, N.C.) News & Record and Furniture|Today, a publication of Reed Business Information.

home

Resume | Blog | Teaching Philosophy | CV