Rate My Professor Mike Lyons

J. Michael Lyons serves as Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Saint Joseph's University. He holds a PhD from Indiana University-Bloomington and a BA from Temple University. Before entering academia, Lyons built an extensive journalism career, working as a reporter and editor for The Associated Press in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from 2000 to 2003, covering politics, soccer, and European Union matters. He was lead correspondent for Agence France-Presse in the Baltic region from 1998 to 2000 and provided editorial consulting for The Baltic Times. Additional roles included sports and outdoor editor at The Homer News in Alaska, senior reporter at The British Virgin Islands Beacon, reporter at the Williamsport Sun-Gazette, and freelance contributor to The New York Times, MacLean’s Magazine, Caribbean Boating, Caribbean Conservation, and Alaska Magazine. Since joining Saint Joseph's University in 2009, he has taught courses including Crime, Justice and Media, Digital Media Ethics, Civic Media, Twitterers and Tyrants: Social Movements in the Digital Age, and Multimedia Journalism.

Lyons' research and creative work centers on storytelling and civic media, with a particular emphasis on narratives of crime and incarceration. In 2015, he co-founded The Redemption Project alongside Abd'Allah Lateef, John Pace, and Kempis Songster to bring the voices of incarcerated individuals across prison walls in support of criminal justice reform. He also established West Philly Local in 2010, a community journalism site named Philadelphia’s best community news site by Philadelphia Weekly. His peer-reviewed publications include “There’s Urgency Here: A Pedagogy of Discomfort in a Prison Basement” co-authored with Felix Rosado in PUBLIC: The Journal of Imagining America (Vol. 5, No. 2, Spring 2019), “An Army Like That of Gideon: Transnational Reform on the Pages of Free Russia” in American Journalism (32.1, 2015), and “Diffusing Dissent: The Montgomery Story comic and civil disobedience” in Journalism History (summer 2015). Lyons has delivered numerous refereed and invited presentations on topics such as oral histories from prisons, multimedia redemption narratives of juvenile lifers, and civic media pedagogy at conferences including the Oral History Association, International Communication Association, and Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He authored an op-ed, “I know the ‘murderers’ from Oz’s ads. They are no menace to society,” in The Philadelphia Inquirer (November 3, 2022).