Robin Sundaramoorthy always wanted to work in radio. Now an assistant professor in Lehigh’s department of journalism and communication, her love of the broadcast medium began when her parents were going through a divorce and she lived for a time with her grandparents, who listened to the radio constantly.
“Radio was my first love,” Sundaramoorthy says. “It was my friend; I loved the fact that the voices on the radio could just take me to another place.”
Sundaramoorthy, who received her bachelor's degrees in English and mass communication from Newberry College in South Carolina, never worked in radio professionally, but two prominent internships proved foundational to her journalism career. At South Carolina's #1 talk radio station and the local NPR affiliate, she learned to write news stories for both broadcast and print—skills that would define her work for decades. Both positions came with significant responsibility and provided her with firsthand knowledge about how the news industry operates. After earning her master's in journalism from Michigan State University, she spent 20 years in television journalism, starting in Michigan on the overnight weekend shift.
Fortunately, Sundaramoorthy would eventually return to her first love, making it the topic of her doctoral dissertation in 2024 at the University of Maryland. That dissertation, “Black Radio Ownership and the FCC’s Failed Attempt to Diversify the Airwaves,” won awards from the American Journalism Historians Association and the Broadcasters Education Association, and received the highly prestigious Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association this year.
Spotlight Recipient
Robin Sundaramoorthy
Assistant Professor