, Dean of the School of Journalism
Office phone: (406) 243-5250

Peggy Kuhr joined the School of Journalism as dean in August 2007. Before that, she was Knight Chair on the Press, Leadership and Community at the University of Kansas. While at KU, she and Richard Harwood of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation developed a Web site featuring community journalism tools, training and insights into how communities work. The Covering Communities Web site was funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. In 2006-07, she created the Rosedale Project, in which KU journalism students developed an after-school journalism program for students at Rosedale Middle School in Kansas City, Kan.

Kuhr was a founding member of the Community Journalism Interest Group in AEJMC (Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication) and was the group's chair in 2006-07. She helped develop the Citizen Journalism Academy, a joint project between the World Co. in Lawrence, Kan., and KU's William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

She joined KU in August 2002 after serving as managing editor for content at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. The newspaper was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993 in spot news reporting for coverage of the Randy Weaver standoff on Ruby Ridge in North Idaho. Kuhr was city editor at the time, and directed reporting coverage of the 13-day siege.

In Spokane, she also taught classes at Gonzaga University and Eastern Washington University, and was a regular guest on a local television news talk show that debuted convergence work between the newspaper and KHQ-TV.

Kuhr serves on the New Voices Advisory Board, for J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, at the University of Maryland. She also is a member of the Advisory Board for The Teaching Newspaper: Knight Fellows in Community Journalism, with The University of Alabama and The Anniston Star.

She was on the Associated Press Managing Editors national board of directors, and from KU she chaired a university teaching initiative for APME's National Credibility Roundtables Project.

She has worked for The Hartford Courant in Hartford, Conn., and began her journalism career at the Great Falls Tribune. She's received two fellowships: In the early 1980s, she was a Michigan Journalism Fellow; and in the mid-1970s she received a Rotary International Graduate Fellowship to study for a year at the Universite de Rouen in France.

She received her undergraduate degree in journalism and French from the University of Montana, and her Masters in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University.

Her husband is Thomas Foor, who is professor emeritus in anthropology at UM. He continues to teach UM classes occasionally, and is adjunct curator of culture and art for the Spencer Art Museum at the University of Kansas.

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