Faculty Interview Spring Newsletter 2021

For our inaugural edition, we interviewed Professor José Luis Benavides who has been with the university since August 2002 (19 years!) and shares some of his highlights of how he got here. José Luis Benavides is co-director of the Institute for Arts and Media and professor of the Department of Journalism at California State University, Northridge, where he created and developed the first interdisciplinary minor in Spanish-language journalism in the U.S. He established the Spanish-language student newspaper El Nuevo Sol, which he transformed in 2007 into a multimedia blog covering topics relevant to Latino communities, including border and immigration issues. Benavides was chair of the Department of Journalism for a three-year term, from 2009–2012. He earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Communications at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as the teaching assistant for the award-winning student publication, Tejas, for six years.