Elon University welcomes Pulitzer Prize winner, 5 others
as full-time School of Communications faculty members

Six new faculty members have joined Elon's School of Communications in a full-time capacity this fall and two more are new adjunct instructors, bringing the overall number of Communications faculty and staff to 30. Here's a brief introduction to the people joining Elon's Communications crew.


Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Skube joins the Elon faculty from being Louis B. Weil Visiting Professor at Indiana University. Skube was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and then won the 1989 Pulitzer for Criticism while serving as book editor and critic at the Raleigh News & Observer. He was book editor, feature writer and columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1993 to 2000. Skube graduated with a B.A. from Louisiana State University. After graduate work in political science at LSU, Skube taught arithmetic and science for two years in an all-black elementary school in Louisiana that was under federal court order to hire at least one white teacher. He worked eight years with U.S. Customs in Miami before going into journalism full time. He became state capital bureau chief in Raleigh for the Winston-Salem Journal and joined the News & Observer for 11 years before going to Atlanta, where he won the James Beard Award in 2000. Skube has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror six times to date, including as a jury chairman in 1998 and 2000. He will teach Reporting & Newswriting and the Advanced Reporting class this fall.



Associate Professor Anthony Hatcher is new to Elon after being chairman of the communication studies department at Pfeiffer University in North Carolina the past two years. Hatcher earned his Ph.D. in journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His B.A. and M.Ed. degrees are from UNC-Greensboro. Before that, he was an associate professor of English at Mount Olive College. Hatcher worked at the Winston-Salem Journal on an experimental cable videotext project and was editor of The Clemmons Courier before becoming a professor. Last year he was a correspondent for the Faith & Values section of The Charlotte Observer. He will teach two sections of Introduction to Communications and a section of Public and Presentational Speaking this fall.





Nancy Engelhardt comes to Elon from being a senior communications manager with the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C. She completed her Ph.D. in Mass Communication at the University of Southern Mississippi, with her dissertation on eco-labeling and environmental marketing. Engelhardt earned a B.A. in journalism and a B.S. in marketing at Louisiana Tech and became a copywriter with an advertising agency. She returned to school to complete a master's degree at Louisiana State University and became a Russian linguist and public affairs officer with the U.S. Army. Before entering the Ph.D. program, Engelhardt was a marketing manager for a technology center in Oregon. Engelhardt will teach two sections of Principles of Public Relations this fall.





Harlen Makemson completed his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this year and will be teaching two sections of Web Publishing and Design at Elon this fall. He completed a B.S. degree in journalism at the University of Kansas and became a newspaper reporter and sports writer. He earned a master's degree at the University of Missouri and became design editor at The Huntsville Times (Alabama) and then the Lexington Herald-Leader (Kentucky), where his work won honors from the Society for News Design. At UNC and at North Carolina State, Makemson taught news writing and media history. He won first place in the graduate student division in the 2001 national Promising Professors competition in Washington, D.C.





Kelli Burns comes to Elon from Middle Tennessee State University, where she taught media writing. She is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Florida, where she taught advertising research and worked with the Florida Scholastic Press Association, which supports high school journalism teachers and students. Burns earned a B.A. degree in mathematics at Vanderbilt University and a master's degree from Middle Tennessee State. Professionally, she was a marketing consultant before joining Prince Market Research in Nashville. At Harris Interactive in New York, she coordinated and conducted online research projects for Young & Rubican advertising agency. She will teach two sections of Organizational Communications this fall.





Nadia Watts, an instructor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last spring, joins Elon on a one-year contract and will teach Introduction to Communications and two sections of Writing and Information Gathering this fall. Watts earned a B.A. in English with a minor in Spanish at the College of William & Mary and earned an M.A. in journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. At UNC, she taught newswriting and served as assistant director of the North Carolina Scholastic Media Association. She previously was senior editor of a trade magazine and publications editor for The Freedom Forum, a Washington-based foundation dedicated to free speech and free press.





Adjunct faculty members Sen and Lashley are accomplished communicators

Nandini Sen, a Ph.D. candidate at Temple University whose dissertation is on the wireless and Internet sectors in India, will teach two sections of Introduction to Communications this fall. She earned a B.A. in literature from Calcutta University and an M.A. in broadcasting from Temple, where she was an assistant in the Communication Theory course. Sen twice was a senior copywriter at J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in Calcutta and Bombay, creating campaigns for multinational brands.

Elon graduate Michele Lashley, president of Karacom Creative agency in Raleigh, will teach Principles of Advertising this fall. She was editor of Elon's student newspaper, The Pendulum, and graduated cum laude in 1987 with a journalism and communications major. Lashley earned a master's degree with an advertising specialty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a law degree from North Carolina Central. She was an attorney for four years before becoming an account and public relations executive with Business-to-Business Marketing Communications in Raleigh.