Cody Hmelar

Cody Hmelar is an award-winning multimedia journalist, broadcast engineer and doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh’s composition and rhetoric program. He earned his MA in Community & Investigative reporting in 2024 and BA in Journalism & Writing Studies in 2023 from Hofstra University.

Cody’s research focuses on academic policy inasmuch as it impacts the classroom experience for students. Most recently, Cody is researching the co-habitional populations in the Mississippi River Delta and San Francisco Bay Area to learn how caste, class and colonialism impact academic experience with language—historically and in the present.

Cody is the producer of 1World, a collaboration between WRHU-FM and BUSH Radio in Cape Town, South Africa that explores local and global issues from a positive solutions-based approach. Before working at Pitt, he served as one of the youngest Chief Engineers in the United States, managing technical operations for multiple radio stations in Philadelphia and New York. His stories have been featured on WRHU, WLIW, WABC, KALW, The Long Island Advocate, TechRadar and Technical.ly. He utilizes his community reporting to influence community-engaged research in the academy.

His work in media has appeared nationally and internationally on the air and online. He’s served as associate editor for The Best of the Journals of Rhetoric and Composition 2023, Co-Chair of the Undergraduate Research Standing Group for the Conference for College Composition and Communication (CCCC), President of the Philadelphia chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA), Member of the AAJA Style Guide Committee, Secretary of the Society of Broadcast Engineers and President of the University of Pittsburgh English Graduate Student Organization.

Presentation Data

Presenter, Restorative Storytelling and Embodied Technocultural Praxis across Asian/Asian American Communities, Conference for College Composition and Communication, April 2025 Chair, Mentoring for Publication: How We Can Help Our Undergrads Through Research, Conference for College Composition and Communication, April 2025 Presenter, Linguistic Justice: Is there room for the Asian Diaspora in the Conversation, Conference for College Composition and Communication, April 2024 Chair, Undergraduate Student Research Panel, Conference for College Composition and Communication, April 2024 Presenter, Student POV: Immersive Media in The Classroom, Where We Lose Engagement and How We Can Change Our Focus in Curriculum, Conference for Writing Program Administrators, July 2023 Presenter, Immersive Media in the Classroom: What TikTok Can Teach Us About Contemporary Pedagogy, Conference for College Composition and Communication, February 2023 Presenter, TikTok in the Classroom, Naylor Workshop for Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, November 2022 Invited Lecturer, Diversity in Media, Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism, New York University, March 2023

Other Accomplishments

Launched the revised Style Guide for the Asian American Journalists Association. Now as an interactive website, worked for over a year with academics and journalists to ensure the most accuracy and precision when using terms that affect Asian American and diasporic Asian populations. (https://www.aajastyleguide.org)

Links

Listen to “The Last Montaukett” on WRHU and The Long Island Advocate

Read his capstone on the fight to Save Cantonese in San Francisco

Listen to "Que Pasa, Long Island?" on WLIW

View his journalism portfolio