Thomas Horky will serve as the Lynn and Dana Roper Visiting Professor in Sports Journalism from August to October of 2022. Horky is a professor of sport communication at Macromedia University in Hamburg and he’s been teaching since 2009.
While at UNL, he’s teaching a 1 credit pop-up course called “European Sports and Media: The 2022 Football World Cup.” He’ll host the last day of class at The Happy Raven for a Knowledge on Tap discussion where he’ll share how students gained an in-depth understanding of European sports media.
Before joining Macromedia University, he was a research assistant at one of the biggest sport universities in the world, the German Sport University in Cologne. Horky lectures at other universities around Germany and he served on the Board of Directors for the International Association for Communication and Sport for five years.
Horky’s teaching and learning focus is entirely international. In 2020, he was invited to lecture in South Africa about the World Cup and he’s given numerous lectures in China and all over Europe.
In 2018, Horky was invited to be a visiting professor in the Media School at the University of Indiana where he taught two classes related to the 2018 World Cup.
“I spent six months in Indiana and I realized that not many German scholars are in the Midwest, compared to on the coast,” Horky said “I wanted to get in contact with other European scholars in the U.S. and that’s how I met Frauke.”
Frauke Hachtmann, who is from Germany and has been living in Lincoln for 30 plus years, is a professor of advertising & public relations and sports media & communication at CoJMC. She asked Horky if he’d like to teach a class at the college as a visiting sportswriter and Horky knew it’d be a great opportunity to discuss the upcoming 2022 World Cup this winter in Qatar.
“I like this special atmosphere here in the Midwest with this focus on sports,” Horky said. “It’s always a big experience to see how the sporting events are organized and to feel the atmosphere at these events.”
Horky is seeing as many Husker sporting events as he can during his two month stay in Nebraska. So far he’s been to volleyball and soccer matches, as well as, the first home football game.
The Lynn and Dana Roper Fund encourages and rewards sports writing among journalism students by providing a yearly visit from a noted sportswriter to teach at the college and financing the annual sports writing contest.
