Churchill Roberts, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC) Media Production, Management, and Technology professor, will retire from the College in August after a nearly 53-year teaching career including 26 years at UFCJC. Previously, he taught at the University of West Florida for 26 years.

Roberts’ academic and professional accomplishments have been extensive. He joined the College in 1998 and, with Telecommunication Professor Sandra Dickson, created the Documentary Institute, a graduate program in documentary filmmaking. Institute students produced nearly 40 documentaries. Five films produced by Institute faculty aired nationally on PBS. During this period, he and his colleagues were awarded more than $450,000 in grants, mostly to support their documentary work.

He has taught more than 20 courses, including Documentary and Social Change, History of Documentary, International Broadcasting, The Constitution and the Press and Social Impact of Mass Media. Roberts served as Department of Telecommunication interim chair from 2001-2002 and interim associate dean for research from 2004-2006.

Roberts also volunteered for extensive service to the College and University, including three terms as a member of the UFCJC Faculty Senate, UF Faculty Senate delegate from 2015-2018, chair of the College’s Equity, Tenure and Promotion Committee, Research, and International Committees, and chief grievance officer for United Faculty of Florida.

He has produced, directed, or co-directed thirteen documentaries during his career, and has one – “Discovering the Kingdom of Women” – in production. Some of his early quantitative research dealt with the stereotypical portrayals of Black people or the absence of Black people in television entertainment and news programming. That research fed into his film work, including two documentary films about remarkable Black activists — Freedom Never Dies: The Legacy of Harry T. Moore (2001) and Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power (2006), both of which aired nationally on PBS and were winners of the Organization of American Historians’ Erik Barnouw Award for best historical documentary.

Roberts’ documentary work often featured unsung heroes, including Angel of Ahlem, about an American solider during World War II, The Last Flight of Petr Ginz about a Czech prodigy who was a victim of the Holocaust (the film was the centerpiece of the 2012 United Nations Holocaust Remembrance Week), The Curse of the Terracotta Warriors, a film about the discovery of one of China’s greatest treasures, and Last Days of the Revolution, which examined the reasons behind the economic crisis Cuba suffered in the early 1990s and the subsequent mass exodus of Cubans to the United States.

In addition to teaching at UFCJC, Roberts has taught courses and workshops at FSU’s Florence Study Center in Florence, Italy, UF’s Paris Research Center, Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, China, and Wuhan Communication University. He has been a visiting lecturer at 16 Chinese universities, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Wuhan University, Hunan University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Xi’an University of Finance and Economics, Shaanxi Normal University, Renmin University, and Shanghai University.

In 2023, he and 13 classmates from Memphis Central High Class of 1959 published From Rock around the Clock to TikTok: Eighty Years of Life, Learning and Hope.  Each wrote accounts of their lives so far and published them as an anthology.

Posted: April 4, 2024
Category: College News
Tagged as: Churchill Roberts, Documentary Institute, MPMT