Rate My Professor Alexander Leidholdt

Alexander Leidholdt is Professor Emeritus in the School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University, where he served for 20 years until his retirement in 2021. He joined JMU in 2001 following faculty appointments as associate professor and assistant professor at Purdue University, visiting assistant professor at Indiana University after completing postdoctoral work there, and assistant professor and associate director at Old Dominion University. Leidholdt earned his Ph.D. from Old Dominion University, Ed.S. from Indiana University, M.S. from Clarion University, and B.A. from Virginia Wesleyan College. Before entering academia, he worked for twelve years as a media writer and director for advertising agencies, corporations, and educational institutions. During this period, he received a Gold Medal from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and a Crystal Award from the Association for Educational Communications and Technology for the U.S.A./U.S.S.R. Youth Summit Series, a set of three television programs aired on PBS and the Soviet Union’s largest television network.

At JMU, Leidholdt taught courses in media history and media analysis and criticism. He was twice selected as the Ruth D. Bridgeforth Professor of Telecommunications, received the Madison Scholars Award in 2013, and was honored with the College of Arts and Letters Excellence in Service Award. His research centers on journalistic dissent and attempts to silence it, focusing on southern journalists in the first half of the twentieth century who opposed the Ku Klux Klan, exploitative employers, lynching, Jim Crow laws, sexism, religious intolerance, and harsh conditions in prisons and mental institutions. More recently, his work has examined the United States Post Office Department’s surveillance and suppression of foreign-language newspapers during World War I. Key publications include the biographies Standing Before the Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers and Virginia's Massive Resistance to Public-School Integration (University of Alabama Press), Editor for Justice: The Life of Louis I. Jaffé (Louisiana State University Press), and Battling Nell: The Life of Southern Journalist Cornelia Battle Lewis, 1893-1956 (Louisiana State University Press). He has also published articles such as “The Mysterious Mr. Maxwell and Room M-1: Clandestine Influences on American Postal Censorship during World War I” in American Journalism (summer 2019) and “Dancing with Two Cork Legs: The American Post Office’s Stumbling Surveillance of the Foreign-Language Press during World War I” in Journalism History.