Biography
Richard J. Roth became an emeritus professor in 2018 after 20 years at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He spent 14 of those years at Northwestern’s Evanston campus and 6 of those years at the campus in Doha, Qatar, where he served as the school’s senior associate dean. Before going to Qatar in 2008 to launch the journalism degree program there, he was Medill’s senior associate dean in Evanston for six years and associate dean for four years before that. Roth has been an educator since 1990, except for a brief stint as a guest editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York at the time that publication launched its online edition. Before going to The Journal, Roth was a tenured member of the English faculty at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where he also served as the adviser to the award-winning student newspaper.
Before academe, Roth was a newspaperman, having been editor-in-chief of the Tribune-Star in Terre Haute, Indiana, and a reporter at the Buffalo (N.Y.) Courier-Express, which ceased publication in 1982. He has won dozens of awards for his reporting and writing. Roth is a member of the international advisory board of the International Academic Forum, which sponsors multi-disciplinary conferences around the world. In the past, Roth served on the advisory board for Qatar University’s Mass Communications Program, on the national board of directors of the U.S.-based Society of Professional Journalists, as an international vice president of The Newspaper Guild, as president of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors association, and as academic adviser to the U.S. Project for Excellence in Journalism. He has taught or made major presentations about journalism to audiences in India, Japan, Kuwait, Lesotho, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and, of course, Qatar and the United States.