Meet Baylor’s nationally recognized expert on gender, race and media

Just a glance at the resume of Dr. Mia Moody-Ramirez, MA ’01, will tell you where her passion lies. The chair of Baylor’s Department of Journalism, Public Relations and New Media, Moody-Ramirez teaches courses in public relations, research methods and gender, race and media studies.

Her expertise on these topics has been featured in local, national and international media outlets — particularly at times when the nation’s attention turned to racially-charged events and reaction unfolded on social media.

In 2009, she published a study on the “missing white woman syndrome” — the tendency for media outlets to cover missing white women more than missing women of color — which is still cited today by outlets as large as the Washington Post. After the heated 2016 U.S. presidential election, her expertise on damaged relationships with friends online was highly sought-after. And more recently, she was a source on why social media users felt so outraged at the media’s apparent lack of coverage of the Austin bombings last March. (Find a full list of Moody-Ramirez’s articles and papers here.)

[Learn more about Dr. Mia Moody-Ramirez in this 2015 Wacoan interview.]

Moody-Ramirez’s works include The Obamas and Mass Media: Race, Gender, Religion, and Politics, Framing of Racial Profiling: A Historical Perspective, and From Blackface to Black Twitter: Reflections on Black Humor, Race, Politics & Gender. Her writing about media as an academic comes as a veteran of the media industry, having worked as a writer and columnist for the Waco Tribune-Herald, and as an editor and publisher for two magazines and one publishing company. She has also served as an officer for three different divisions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, a nonprofit, educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals.

Sic ’em, Dr. Moody-Ramirez!

[updated June 2020]