Werner Severin, 83, a prominent journalism educator and photo-journalist, died of natural causes January 5th suddenly after collapsing at a restaurant where he was having dinner in Austin. Prior to his reputation as a no-nonsense, iconoclast at the University of Texas, he photographed many international historical figures, but eventually left his legacy of teaching in the United States, Asia and Europe.
Dr. Severin was a retired journalism professor who taught at UT for several decades. He is remembered by most for the textbook he co-authored, Communication Theories: Orgins, Methods and Uses in the Mass Media , which is still a standard in college classrooms. Werner served in the U.S. Army as a photographer in the post-war European theater. He was a Fulbright scholar, who taught and traveled throughout the world assisting foreign students in their journalistic pursuits.
In recognition of his work, this June in Eskisehir, Turkey, the annual international conference on Communication in the Millennium will be dedicated in honor of Severin, who taught for more than three decades at The University of Texas, and who lectured in Turkey early in this decade. He was the “intellectual catalyst” for this annual conference, according to Maxwell McCombs, a colleague of Severin at Texas, where two young key Turkish scholars Serra Gorpe and Erkan Yuksel, identified by Severin, were brought to Austin by McCombs in 2003 for their sabbaticals. They and McCombs subsequently founded the annual international conference which especially attracts Turkish and American communication scholars.
A half-century before that, as a photographer for the Army Signal Corps in Europe (1948-1952), Severin’s assignments included covering the Berlin Airlift in 1949, and being one of the first two photographers assigned to The Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE) in 1950, where his photo of General Dwight Eisenhower’s return to the Normandy beaches in 1951, won The Photography International Contest prize — plus the expressed appreciation from the General.
In his career, Severin also photographed Charles Lindbergh, President Truman, Queen Elizabeth, and Indira Gandhi in various public and private settings, and he won the National Press Photographers prize for his United Press International coverage of the prison riots in Jefferson City, Missouri. His photos also appeared in Time, Newsweek and National Geographic and he was a writer and editor for the Associated Press and Look magazine in New York.
After his bachelors and master’s degrees in journalism (1956, 1959) at the University of Missouri, he earned a Ph.D. in mass communication at the University of Wisconsin in 1967 where he and fellow scholar Bruce Westley produced often cited significant research on newspaper readership and credibility. Severin also taught at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri (1955-1957; at the University of Maryland (1957-1960); the University of Alaska (1964-1965) and the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point (1967-1969) before moving to the University of Texas, where he wrote his widely used text on Communication Theories: Origins, Methods Uses with co-author, the late James Tankard, his colleague at Texas.
That translated book attracted international attention, including Fudan University in Shanghai in The People’s Republic of China, to which Dr. Severin was appointed as the first Fulbright Scholar in journalism (1984-85). He lectured throughout the country on “The ‘Westernization’ of Chinese Mass Media.” At The People’s University in Beijing (the leadership training center for the Chinese Communist Party) after a three-hour Q and A session on the value of press freedom with faculty and students, Severin recalled that he was told he was the first American to do so—and he was invited back for three additional lectures.
In Asia, he lectured on new media technologies to the Japanese Journalists Association’s annual convention in Tokyo in June 1985, and he taught for six weeks as one of 15 U.S. journalists for the Press Institute of India and the U.S. Education Foundation, aided by a grant from the Research Institute at the University of Texas, where he was also a member of the Center for Asian Studies.
At the University of Texas, he taught a lengthy array of courses including both undergraduate skills and graduate seminars, served many years as chairman of the Graduate Studies Committee, supervised theses and dissertations by students later successful in the field, including winners of the most student prizes in the first eight years of the Mass Communications and Society Division of the National Association for Education in Journalism. In addition, he presented and published scores of his own research papers and articles in Journalism Quarterly and other scholarly as well as professional outlets.
He was a member and longtime campus adviser for Kappa Tau Alpha, the national journalism honorary society, and was national president of Kappa Alpha Mu, honor society for photo-journalism. He was also a consultant for the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Public Health Service.
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This website has been assembled by his son, Paul, to honor his father and as a way to ask others, throughout the world, to remember his life. You may submit any memories or comments you have of Dr. Severin for others to reflect upon in the blog section below.
In lieu of flowers or other memorial gifts, please consider making a donation of any amount to the Catherine Garots Severin Nursing Scholarship at Goshen College in Indiana, an endowment established by Werner in 2004 in honor of his mother Catherine who died in 2001. Click here https://gconline.goshen.edu/acct/prod/online_giving/bin/give_online.php to begin the online donation process. Then click next on “one time credit card gift” and enter the amount of your gift in the box opposite the words “Catherine Garots Severin Nursing Scholarship.”
Thank you for remembering Werner in this special way and for making a difference in the lives of nursing students.
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