College of Arts and Humanities

Faculty Feature

Dr. Jennifer Green

Dr. Jennifer Green began teaching journalism and media courses at CWU in 2008 after more than a decade as an international correspondent in Madrid, Spain. There, she did production work for ABC News, where she worked on stories like the opening of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum and Spain’s first female bullfighter, and she wrote for The Washington Post.

In Madrid, she honed a specialty covering the Spanish film industry for trade publications like The Hollywood Reporter and Screen International, and she continues to write about and review films for multiple media outlets, including The Seattle Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Hollywood Reporter, and Common Sense Media.

Her journalistic work inspired academic research and a dissertation on the changing US market for Spanish cinema over the last three decades, resulting in a doctoral degree through the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She also holds a Masters's in Cultural Anthropology from San Francisco State University and a Bachelors's in Comparative Literature (French and English) from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Before Central, Jennifer taught at Syracuse University’s study-abroad campus in Madrid. What she loves about teaching is working with and mentoring college-aged students who are full of energy and creativity. She gains inspiration from their openness to discovering and exploring new ideas, skills, and futures. She especially enjoys advising the award-winning, student-run media outlets PULSE magazine and The Observer newspaper.

Jennifer also teaches film classes for the Film Program and the Douglas Honors College. In 2020, she was honored with Central’s Non-Tenure Track Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. When she’s not teaching, she can be found on the tennis court or in front of a movie screen. She enjoys spending time with her kids, her friends and family, and her dog and cat.

You can follow Jennifer’s work on her website, Films from Afar:

• Films from Afar
• PULSE Students Interview Dr. Green
• The Observer
• PULSE Magazine

Joe Tradii

By: Simone Tuilaepa
June 10, 2019

Professor Joe Tradii is in his first year of lecturing at CWU. He most recently served as the director of marketing for Frontier Communications, which he jokingly describes as “the biggest telecom no one has ever heard of,’ but would find time to teach occasionally at Seattle University. At Frontier Communications, Tradii was in charge of the western division of the Northeast-based corporation. Spending the last several decades of his career in the private sector, Tradii started off as an advertising copywriter, which quickly took off into a career of working with several major companies including Verizon Wireless and Microsoft. He received his Masters's Degree from UC Irvine with a focus in marketing but now specializes in his lectures on public relations and advertising.

When asked what he loves the most about the Communications Department, Professor Tradii did not hesitate to highlight the bright students that he works with. The students reinforce his reasoning for deciding to make a career switch into teaching, saying that he wanted to give back and make a difference in a more concrete and personal way; teaching full-time felt like the right call in accomplishing this goal. At the end of his first quarter on campus, Tradii taught a final lecture that revolved around general life lessons that were well received by his students, which again reiterated the impact he could make through teaching.

In the classroom, Tradii likes to keep his classes interactive and Socratic. Although he lectures, he prefers to relate the content back to personal, real-world situations for the students so that they are better prepared beyond the university. Tradii instructs several writing-based classes and stresses the value of good writing. “You learn to write by reading good writing, and then by writing yourself, and then rewriting,” which is a process that he helps his pupils perfect. Tradii particularly enjoys the one on one component of teaching students how to write well.

Even in his short time at Central, his best experience in teaching has been hearing back from students after each quarter. Students have thanked him for the valuable information and lessons he shares. In his free time, Professor Tradii enjoys reading, watching cheesy sci-fi movies and is an avid hiker. He is also a writer having recently published a book titled From Ameche to Zozzled: A Glossary of Hard-Boiled Slang of the 1920s through the 1940s. The next book he is working on is The Ten Advertisements that Changed How People Interacted with the World. We are lucky to have Professor Tradii as a new addition to the college.