Professor Burnis R. Morris earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Mississippi in 1973 and an M.P.A. in Public Administration from the University of Dayton in 1977. Professor Morris joined the Marshall University Journalism & Mass Communications faculty in 2003 as the Carter G. Woodson Professor and co-founded The Dr. Carter G. Woodson Lyceum (with the late Alan Gould) in 2016. Since 2023, Morris and Marshall President Brad Smith have been co-chairing the Negro History Week/Black History Month Centennial Committee, which includes raising external funding and planning major events such as free online Black History courses with Dr. Julia Spears and a symposium with Dr. Montserrat Miller, as well as other programs. Morris was selected as a Distinguished Drinko Fellow, the Senior Faculty Distinguished Artists and Scholars Award winner and a West Virginia History Hero. He was named in the first group of John Marshall Summer Scholars, and he was recognized as a “National Trailblazer of Diversity” by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He is also a former Freedom Forum First Amendment Center professional scholar at Vanderbilt University. Morris’s work has been supported by grants from the West Virginia Humanities Council for Black History institutes (five) and Knight Foundation (three) to create a national training program for journalists covering nonprofit organizations, and he created high school journalism workshops (2009-2019) that were supported by the Herald-Dispatch. Morris is the author of Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations (2017). and numerous articles and essays such as “Dr. Carter G. Woodson: A Century of Making Black Lives Matter,” which has been published in a public history volume called Radical Roots: Public History and Social Justice (2021). Before academe, Morris served in a variety of capacities at several newspapers owned by Cox Enterprises in Dayton, Atlanta, Austin, and West Palm Beach. He began his career as a New York Times intern and was the first Black student at the University of Mississippi named to Who’s Who in American Colleges and Universities.
