Peter Mwesige
School of Journalism
Indiana University

Peter Mwesige is a former journalist from Uganda, who is now a Ph.D. Candidate in Mass Communications at Indiana University, Bloomington.

He worked for six years as a political reporter and editor with Uganda’s major newspapers. His reporting of the Constituent Assembly that debated and enacted the country’s 1995 Constitution earned him the “Best” Reporter award in the Uganda Journalism Awards. He also received a Merit Award for Political Commentary in the Uganda Book Week of 1997.

Mwesige served for two years as president of the National Institute of Journalists of Uganda, secretary for education of the Uganda Newspaper Editors and Proprietors Association, and was a member of the Governing Council of the East African Media Institute—Uganda Chapter.

Mwesige also taught journalism and communication at Uganda’s leading university, Makerere, where he earned his first degree in mass communication. He is currently on study leave from the mass communication department at Makerere.

Before joining Indiana University, Mwesige wrote for the Uganda Journalism Review, which he helped found during his tenure as NIJU president. He also presented several papers on the media and politics in Africa at workshops and conferences.

Mwesige has brought this wealth of professional and academic experience to bear on his interdisciplinary graduate work at Indiana. He is strongly committed to African studies as evidenced by most of his graduate research at the American University in Cairo, where he earned his MA in Journalism & Mass Communication, and at Indiana. His research focuses on mass media systems and political communication in Africa. He has written several papers that explore the role of the media in democratic struggles in colonial East Africa, and the linkages between media and democratization in contemporary Africa.

His work on Ugandan journalists won the Indiana University School of Journalism’s “Best Ph.D. Level Research” paper in 2002—the second time he was winning the award in a row—and “Second Place” in the International Communication Division’s Student Competition at the 2002 annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. He also won this year’s Indiana University Carleton Hodge Prize in African Studies.

Mwesige is now writing his Ph.D. dissertation on political talk radio and democratization in Uganda. The Compton Foundation Peace Scholar Fellowship funded his research, while the Randolph Jennings Dissertation Fellowship of the United States Institute of Peace is funding his writing.

Mwesige continues to write a weekly column, “No-Holds-Barred,” for The Monitor, Uganda’s leading private newspaper.

He is married to Jackie, and they have one son, Jotham.