Office Hours: email for appointments
Professor Emerita Bella Mody, former deCastro chair in Global Media (2004-2014), uses political economy and socio-cultural contextual frameworks to design public service applications of communication media and journalism in low-income regions of the world. Her research and outreach have addressed media support for agriculture, health, nutrition, literacy and political consciousness-raising based on field work in India, Nepal, Jamaica, Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Liberia and Ghana.
After post-baccalaureate work in the advertising industry and graduate study in the social sciences, Mody returned to rural India to work on the first major use of direct broadcasting for social applications using NASA’s applications technology satellite-6. In the late 1970s, Dr. Mody joined the faculty of Stanford University’s MA program in Communication and International Development. When its USAID funding ended under the Reagan administration, Mody spent nearly two decades on the Telecommunication and Urban Affairs faculties at Michigan State University.
In 2004, Mody joined the University of Colorado as Professor and deCastro chair in Global Media in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) and retired from full time teaching in 2014. At CU Boulder, she initiated the ongoing interdepartmental certificate in International Media with International Affairs. The large faculty-student research project she conducted on how the world’s press covered the genocide in Darfur Sudan won the 2011 Best Book Award from the Global Communication and Social Change Division of the International Communication Association. Her books include “International and Development Communication: a 21st Century Perspective” (ed., Sage 2003), “The Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication” (co-ed., Sage 2001), “Telecommunication Politics” (co-ed., Lawrence Erlbaum 1995), and “Designing Messages for Development Communication” (author, Sage 1991). Her scholarly articles have been published in Global Media and Communication, Communication Theory, The Journal of International Communication, The Information Society, The Journal of Communication, Telecommunication Policy, Telematics and Informatics, Gazette, Communication Research, Journal of Research in Personality and the Journal of Social Psychology.