New Faculty: Kirby Moss
By Leah Franklin

Kirby Moss

Kirby Moss joined the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication this fall as an assistant professor. A former journalist and a cultural anthropologist, Moss said he hopes to teach his journalism students to lose their presumptions.

"I try to infuse anthropology in journalism to make students go beyond their assumptions," Moss said.

Journalists are subjective when they decide what stories to cover, Moss noted, adding that he challenges his students to really think about what they do.

He also said he enjoys teaching and learning from his students.

"I've learned from my students that we do have very entrenched assumptions about people and groups," Moss said. He said the first step in overcoming those assumptions is to acknowledge them, then work on addressing them.

"We're lucky to have him here," said Associate Professor Len Ackland, head of the school's News-Editorial sequence. Moss brings a combination of reporting and anthropology, which makes him a unique addition to the school, Ackland said.

Moss received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. After graduating, he worked as a reporter for five years, writing for the Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska and the Austin American-Statesman in Texas. He also wrote numerous opinion columns in several newspapers.

As a journalist, Moss said he always had more questions. He said that while covering higher education at the Austin American-Statesman, he met many professors, and working with them inspired him to go back to school.

Moss received his master's degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1993. He earned a doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. Before coming to the CU journalism school, Moss spent two years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a postdoctoral fellow. He taught and worked on finishing his first book there.

That book, The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege, addresses issues of social class and race in America. He said he went to his hometown in the Midwest to study poor white people, and the result was an ethnography about whiteness and blackness. He said he looked at whites who are poor and socially marginalized but also surrounded by ideas of racial privilege. In studying class in the United States, Moss said he found that he also had to deal with his position as a black man of "unassumed" privilege in a context of assumed white privilege.

In writing the book, Moss said he tried to disrupt people's assumptions. He added that he wrote the book as an anthropologist and a journalist, and hoped that it would be accessible to a more general audience as well.

"Writing about poverty in America can bring class to the discussion," Moss said. "Journalism takes ideas and makes them accessible to people." The more the media covers class, the more aware the public will be that class exists, he said.