Carlene Hempel
Carlene Hempel has been a practicing journalist for 20 years. She was named a finalist for The Livingston Award, an honor given to the nation’s top magazine writers under the age of 35, for a piece she wrote about a New Hampshire police officer who posed as a 14-year-old boy to attract online predators. Some of her other work for the Globe’s magazine includes articles about the “No Kid” movement, the lucrative celebrity speaker circuit, and college-aged women who sell their eggs to pay off credit card debt.
Professor Hempel began her reporting career at The Middlesex News (now The MetroWest Daily News) in Framingham, Mass. and then moved to North Carolina, where she worked for MSNBC in the NBC affiliate in Raleigh. She left to get her master’s degree in journalism at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later worked as a technology and culture reporter for The News & Observer in Raleigh. After teaching at North Carolina State University, Professor Hempel began full-time at Northeastern’s School of Journalism in 2003. She teaches a number of core courses in the school’s undergraduate program, as well as Magazine Writing, an advanced elective. She also teaches Research Methods in the graduate program.
In the spring of 2009, Professor Hempel took 25 students abroad to Egypt, Syria and Qatar for five weeks to work as international journalists. The program was a first for the School of Journalism, and the Web site she created and edited garnered attention from both The New York Times and The Boston Globe. She returned in 2011 with 19 student journalists and photographers to Jordan and Turkey to do the same. She returned a third time in 2012 with 16 undergraduate and graduate students – this time just to Jordan. Professor Hempel maintained a personal blog about the experience, along with her students, for all three excursions.
Professor Hempel is married to Geoff Edgers, an arts reporter for The Boston Globe, a documentary filmmaker, and the host of a non-fiction television program. Their family was featured in Edgers’ 2010 film “Do It Again,” which is about his two-year quest to reunite the British band The Kinks.
She can be reached at 617.373.4534 or by e-mail at c.hempel@neu.edu. Her office is located in 136 Holmes Hall.
