Shahira Fahmy

Associate Professor, School of Journalism
Associate Professor, Department of Near Eastern Studies

Dr. Fahmy earned full professorship at the University of Arizona, and is the first and only female Arab/ American tenured journalism faculty member at a research university in the United States. Her research focusses on enviromental journalism, international reporting, and visual communication. She is an internationally-renowned scholar, author of three books, six book chapters and over 150 refereed articles and conference presentations nationally and internationally. Her research has appeared in all the top-ranked journals in the journalism field, including Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (JMCQ), Mass Communication & Society (MC&S), American Behavioral Scientist (ABS), Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM), Visual Communication Quarterly (VCQ), International Journal of Communication (IJOC), Journalism: Theory, Practice, and Criticism and International Communication Gazette. She has served on the board of over a dozen scholarly journals. She has been an associate editor for a top-ranked journal, a Fulbright Specialist scholar under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State’s public diplomacy programs overseas, a United Nations consultant as well as an international guest editor, international keynote speaker and lectured on global reporting and visual journalism worldwide. After five years working in the news and broadcast industries in Egypt and Italy and one year photographing a tribe in the Sinai desert, she pursued her doctoral studies. She received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the Missouri School of Journalism, University of Missouri at Columbia, her M.A. in 2000 and her BA in 1991 from the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, The American University in Cairo, Egypt. She is fluent in Arabic, Italian, French and English, and holds US, Egyptian and Italian citizenships.​

Degree(s)

  • PhD, Missouri School of Journalism, 2003
Shahira Fahmy