Beth Haller, PhD

Adjunct Faculty, Disability Studies

Beth Haller, PhD
Contact

Beth Haller, PhD., teaches Disability Studies and Media Studies at Towson University in Maryland. She taught full-time in the Mass Communication Department from 1996-2020. She is adjunct faculty at the CUNY School of Professional Studies’ Disability Studies master’s and undergraduate programs, York University’s Critical Disability Studies graduate program in Toronto, Canada, and the University of Texas-Arlington’s Minor in Disability Studies program.

Haller is co-editor of the 2020 Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (with Gerard Goggin of the University of Sydney and Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is the author of Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She was formerly co-editor of the Society for Disability Studies’ scholarly journal, Disability Studies Quarterly (2003-2006).

Haller helped found the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (GADIM) in 2016, with Patricia Almeida of Brazil, a journalist and mother of a daughter with Down syndrome, and Catia Malaquias of Australia, a lawyer and mother of a son with Down syndrome.  

Haller was a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Sydney and Curtin University in Australia in February 2015 for the project, “Disability, the Media, and Digital Technology: Issues, Challenges, and Future Research.” Haller maintains a blog on disability issues in the news, Media dis&dat. She has been researching media images of disability since 1991, when she did a master’s thesis at the University of Maryland-College Park on the coverage of Deaf persons in The Washington Post and New York Times. Her PhD dissertation at Temple University investigated elite news media coverage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

Her media and disability research has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, Disability & Society, Journalism Studies, The Journal of American Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Asia Pacific Media Educator, Research in Social Science and Disability, Howard Journal of Communication, Journal of Comic Art, Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, Mass Comm Review, Journal of Media Literacy Education, and Journalism History. Haller is a native of Fort Worth, Texas, and received her undergraduate degree in journalism from Baylor University.