Dolan earned his Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of South Carolina in 2003. His dissertation was titled, “Cathartic Uplift: A Cultural History of the Blues and Jazz in the Chicago Defender, 1920-1929,” and his research areas include black press history, journalism as literature, mass media history, historical research methodology, popular culture, legal history and cultural history of American newspapers. Dolan’s work has recently appeared in the fall 2007 Second Annual Music Issue of Southern Cultures, published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill. He has written for several daily newspapers, including the Savannah Morning News, the Naples Daily News, and The (SC) State. Highlights from his newspaper work include interviews with novelists Toni Morrison, Reynolds Price, and Salmon Rushdie and bluegrass legend Doc Watson. He has presented research on the black press at annual conventions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) and the American Journalism Historians Association (AJHA). His teaching interests include editing, communication law and feature writing. He has edited two student-written feature packages for the Pulitzer Prize winning Sun-Herald (2006) and has also generated a student-written magazine, Your New Albany (2005).