Barbara Friedman

Barbara Friedman is an awarded scholar and teacher whose work emphasizes the role and representation of gender, race, sexuality and class in historical and contemporary media. She is an adjunct faculty member of UNC’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies.

She is director of The Irina Project (TIP), which monitors media representations of sex trafficking and advocates for the responsible and accurate reporting of the issue. She co-founded TIP with Anne Johnston (professor emerita) in 2009. For their work, Friedman and Johnston were named Thorp Faculty Engaged Scholars and received the Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy.

In 2024, Friedman was awarded with the Edward Vick Prize for Innovation in Teaching, and in 2014, she was honored with the David Brinkley Teaching Excellence Award.

She directs the Senior Honors Program in the Hussman School.

Friedman’s research has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Human Trafficking, Journalism History, and American Journalism, among other scholarly journals.

She is a past editor of American Journalism, the peer-reviewed quarterly journal of the American Journalism Historians Association. Friedman directs NewStories, an oral history project documenting the lives of North Carolina news workers and newsmakers. She is a faculty affiliate of the Southern Oral History Program at UNC.

Friedman, who joined the school in 2004, is the author of “From the Battlefront to the Bridal Suite: U.S. and British Mass Media Coverage of British War Brides 1942-1946” (University of Missouri Press, 2007). She also is the author of “Web Search Savvy: Strategies and Shortcuts for Online Research” (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), reflecting her professional background as a reporter and editor. A current project is co-editing a news writing textbook with colleagues that focuses on reporting campus news.

Education

• Ph.D., University of Missouri
• M.A., University of Missouri