Photo by Gopal Chitrakar
Dharma Adhikari, PhD
Dharma Nanda Adhikari has been in the media and communication fields since the 1980s. He has worked as a reporter, writer, editor, columnist, and an educator. He is the author of A Compassionate Journalist (2010), a biography of Bharat Dutta Koirala, the winner of the 2002 Magsaysay award in journalism and creative communication arts. Dharma's writings have been published in a wide variety of outlets from Nepal and elsewhere. He writes "Media Sutra", a column on press and media criticism, in Republica newspaper, published out of Kathmandu.
Currently, he is an associate professor at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China. Previously, he served as an associate professor at Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication, Shantou University, as an assistant professor of journalism at Georgia Southern University, USA (2004-07), and as an instructor at the Missouri School of Journalism at Columbia (2000-2004). He also has held visiting positions at Pokhara University and Kathmandu University. His research interests focus on journalism studies, media theory, and intersections of news, new media and technology.
Dharma has been a Fulbright scholar at University of Missouri-Columbia (1998-2000), and an Exchange Fellow (1996) at the Washington D.C.-based International Center for Journalists. He has an MA in English from Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, and an MA and a PhD in journalism from University of Missouri, Columbia. He is the first Nepali to obtain a doctoral degree in journalism from a university in the West.
Dharma is a founding member of the Kathmandu-based Media Foundation, a non-profit that works in the area of media education and research. He maintains a keen interest in the emerging forms of media and has been the director and organizer of Media Gufa, an experiential multimedia journalism challenge for working professionals. He is among Nepal's pioneering online journalists. In 1999, he started newslookmag.com (later renamed nepalmonitor.com), one of the first full-fledged online news sites on Nepal. The site ran for more than 13 years.
