The DePauw faculty members talking with Kushner will be Kim S. Conner, assistant professor, and Steven Timm, associate professor, in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences.
All events are open and free to the public.
DePauw's annual National Undergraduate Communication Honors Conference is designed to encourage undergraduate student scholarship, and students from across the nation submit papers representing individual research. Coordinating the conference is Kent E. Menzel, DePauw associate professor of communication arts and sciences. DePauw was one of the first universities to emphasize the importance of undergraduate research by establishing the annual conference in 1974, Menzel said. Gerbner served as dean of the Annenberg School for Communication for 30 years, and he established there the Cultural Indicators Project, the most sustained effort yet to analyze scientifically the impact of television on society and the lives of its citizens. In 1996 he helped launch the Cultural Environment Movement, a broad-based coalition of citizens, scholars, parents, activists, and media producers and artists, to focus discussion on how the means of storytelling have drifted out of democratic control.