Gene Burd has taught and practiced journalism for 50 years, the last 32 years at Texas, and before that at Minnesota, Marquette, Northwestern, Iowa and at UCLA on a fellowship from the Los Angeles Times. He frequented Aspen Institute and Chautauqua in the early 1950s.
He wrote for the Kansas City Star, Albuquerque Journal, Houston Chronicle, Three Rivers, Michigan Commercial, and suburban weeklies in Los Angeles and Chicago, where he also wrote for Encyclopedia Britannica, and was one of the last residents of Jane Addams' Hull-House. He was on the city planning information staff of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, was an adviser to Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier, and a consultant to the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis-St. Paul and the Denver Urban Observatory.
He was chair and/or a founder of three divisions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) over a 24-year period (for magazines, mass communication & society, qualitative/critical studies); and chaired for two years the mass communication division of the Western Social Science Association.
At Texas, he created courses in minority media, community journalism, urban communication, sports and music journalism, and critical/qualitative studies, and chaired the magazine sequence and graduate studies committees.
His research in 15 book chapters, more than 45 journal articles, 26 abstracts, many poems, and more than 200 conference presentations (including 75 refereed papers and 40 media workshops) has appeared in Journalism Quarterly, Journalism Educator, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Urban Affairs, Nation's Cities, National Civic Review, Quill, Ecquid Novi, Grassroots Editor, Studies in Journalism and Mass Communication, American National Biography, Mass Comm Review, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, Journalism History, Heritage of the Great Plains, Sporting Dystopias and Ethnic Media in America.
He has presented research to AEJMC, International Communication Association, National Communication Association, Popular Culture Association, America Political Science Association, American Studies Association, American Sociological Association, as well as to numerous newspaper and regional scholarly associations. At Texas, he has taught 15 courses and supervised 70 master's theses and reports.
