Janet Hill Keefer, former Dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, teaches courses in print and broadcast journalism as well as Race, Ethnicity and Media. She returned to Drake in 2008 after a four-year leave, during which she was Dean of the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates and a visiting professor in the Nicholson School of Communication at the University of Central Florida in Orlando .

In 2003, she was awarded a fellowship from the Radio Television News Directors Foundation to spend a month in the newsroom of Media General's WMBB-TV in Panama City , Florida , working as an “intern” learning digital editing and as a writing coach for WMBB's reporters and producers.

Before coming to drake in 1994, she was an associate professor of journalism at Penn State University . She worked for 10 years as a television journalist, including four years as a producer for CNN in Washington D.C.

She has a Ph.D. in mass communication research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . She has an M.A. from Ohio State University and a B.S. from the University of Tennessee . She is married to Joseph Keefer and an avid fan of detective fiction, horses, dogs, and cats.