Mark Poepsel '07

Mark Poepsel is an associate professor of Mass Communication at SIU-Edwardsville where he has been for seven years. Mark’s research areas of interest are engaged journalism and entrepreneurial journalism. He occasionally partners on projects researching journalists' freedom and safety in Latin America. Mark teaches media entrepreneurship, science & media literacy, publication design, advanced broadcast writing, introductory mass comm theory, introductory media writing, and feature writing, PR writing, and graduate research methods on occasion. Mark led a group of journalism students to study abroad in Buenos Aires in July of 2019. There they learned about the heroic tradition of journalism during the guerra sucia and they also learned about environmental media and media history in South America while touring several major news outlets in the capital. Mark is the president of his faculty union. He and Gabriela Renteria-Poepsel are married with a son, Sammy.

"My Latin American Studies degree prepared me in two ways for my career and life. First, it made me a better qualitative researcher, which served me through my dissertation up to my research today. Second, it gave me a broader and deeper perspective of Latin American media, which influences my research presentations at the International Symposium on Online Journalism (ISOJ) at the University of Texas-Austin. ISOJ connects superstar journalists and researchers from throughout the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking continent to learn about latest practices, technologies, academic research, and challenges in the field. Without my LAS degree, I would not have been prepared to be part of this amazing confluence of journalists and researchers."