Email wkovarik@radford.edu
Office phone 540 831 6033
Office fax 540 831 6005
Office: 200 Jefferson St. PO Box 6929 Radford University Radford VA 24142
Bill Kovarik, Ph.D.
is a Professor of Communication at Radford University in southwestern Virginia. He is a journalist and historian who has worked with wire services, daily newspapers and national news magazines. He teaches science and environment writing, media history and media law.
Kovarik is on sabbatical in the fall of 2009 and serving as the 2009 Canwest Global Media Fellow at the University of Western Ontario.
He is a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University (1974), the University of South Carolina (M.A., 1983) and the University of Maryland (Ph.D., 1993). His Ph.D. dissertation, The Ethyl Controversy, explored the role of the news media in protecting the public interest in a scientific controversy over leaded gasoline and safer alternatives.
Kovarik has also served on the faculty at Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland. His professional experience as a journalist includes reporting and editing for Jack Anderson, the Associated Press, The Charleston (S.C.) Courier, The Baltimore Sun, Time-Life Books, Business Publishers and the National Center for Appropriate Technology. He is a co-author of "The Forbidden Fuel" (1982, with Hal Bernton and Scott Sklar), "Mass Media and Environmental Conflict" (1996, with Mark Neuzil), and author of "Web Design for the Mass Media" (2001).
Kovarik serves as an academic representative on the board of directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists and as an Editor at Large of Appalachian Voice.
Onging projects include:
- The Ethyl War: Henry Ford, Charles Kettering and the Fuel of the Future , is a history of renewable fuels.
- The Renewable Energy History Project is an attempt to recover some of the lost history of renewable energy.
- The Environmental History Timeline, is an independent project that attempts to describe some of the tradition of environmental advocacy across many centuries.
- Online Guide to Media Law, based on a need for media law education using real world examples in an international framework.
- Freedom First, a history of ideas about free speech and press.
- A Web Treasury of Great Reporting and other documents of media history;
Prof. K and family in the Argyle forest of Scotland. Summer 2006. "Forest" being a somewhat different concept in Scotland than in the US.