Foss originally came to UNM from Humboldt University in northern California and worked as a faculty member until she became director of Women’s Studies in 1995. After two years she became chair of the C&J department and remained in that position until 2000, when she returned to being a faculty member. Two years ago Foss became department chair once again.
“There has always been a nice community in C&J. I have enjoyed my colleagues, my graduate students and the opportunity to do administration,” Foss said. “It’s a different way to contribute than just being a professor or researcher.”
Foss did not originally plan to work in the communication field. As an undergraduate student at the University of Oregon, she majored in Spanish and French with the intention of becoming a language teacher at a high school.
“I went to student teach and realized I didn’t want to go back to high school. I hated high school,” Foss said. “This was the winter quarter of my senior year in college and I looked through the catalogue for a new major. I came across communications and thought ‘maybe I like the process of communication — I just want to do it in English.’”
She decided to get a Master’s degree in Communication and then got a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in the same field.
Foss has done a great deal of research on communication with a focus on feminism, she said.
“A lot of my research has dealt with feminist perspectives on communication, primarily because they didn’t exist when I came into the field,” Foss said. “It just kind of annoyed me that we were always studying great, white dead men, and they were certainly not the only people in existence.”
She has researched the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentine mothers whose children were murdered under the country’s military dictatorship, who march in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires weekly to protest their deaths.
Foss has also researched Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician to be elected into office, who served as a city supervisor in San Francisco. She said she chose to look at Milk’s communication strategies after his assassination in California, where she was living at the time.
She has also published a book about the communication theories of the activists in the women’s movement.
“Whatever I do, there’s always something feminist about it,” Foss said.
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After she retires from UNM she plans to travel and to work on a few ongoing writing projects.
It has not yet been decided who will take over the position, but the decision could be made as early as next week, Foss said.
Marielle Dent is a staff reporter for the Daily Lobo. You can reach her at mdent@unm.edu or on Twitter @Marielle_Dent.
