Patricia Aufderheide

Patricia Aufderheide is the Director of SOC's Center for Social Media and teaches in the Visual Media Division. Her professional background includes: John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship; Fulbright Research Fellow, Brazil; cultural/senior editor, In These Times; associate editor, Black Film Review; senior editor, American Film magazine. Contributor, The Washington Post, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Journal of Communication, Communication Law and Policy, others. Author, Communications Policy and the Public Interest, The Daily Planet. Editor, Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding; Latin American Visions. Contributing author, Seeing Through Movies, Watching Television, Voices of Dissent, The Media, others. Senior editorial advisor, Signal to Noise documentary series. Film Advisory Board member, National Gallery of Art.

Barbara Diggs-Brown

Professor Barbara Diggs-Brown is a prominent national researcher on the development of effective communication campaigns as tools to address issues of race relations. A respected author, she and fellow faculty member Professor Leonard Steinhorn co-authored a critically-acclaimed analysis of race relations in the U.S, By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusion of Integration and the Reality of Race (hardback, Dutton, 1999; paperback, Plume, 2000). The journal, Poverty and Race dedicated two issues to the book, featuring extensive excerpts and commentary from important scholars and writers. Diggs-Brown and Steinhorn have contributed book chapters based on their book to Double Exposure II: Integration, Education and Race in America (Sharpe, 2000), and to Race Relations (Greenhaven Press, 2000). Diggs-Brown frequently lectures and writes on cultural diversity in the media.

In the classroom, students benefit from Diggs-Brown's successful public affairs career in Washington which included positions as Director of Public Affairs, Urban Mass Transportation Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation; Director of Scheduling and Liaison for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; and as a press secretary, in the Carter/Mondale Administration. She has also served as a media advisor to political campaigns, public officials and advocacy groups.

She contributed the chapter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett: About the Business of Agitation, to A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture (University of Tennessee Press, 1996). Her most recent book is Techniques for Public Communication Professionals, a collaboration with PR professional Jodi Glou, a colleague and former student.

Diggs-Brown teaches public relations management and production courses throughout the curriculum. She has served as head of the Public Communication Division, and twice during her tenure, Acting Associate Dean for SOC.

Maria Ivancin

Maria Ivancin is a faculty member with the Public Communication division. She comes to us from Georgetown University, where she taught Integrated Marketing Communications, Principles of Marketing, Advertising Campaign Planning and Consumer Behavior and Marketing Research. As president of Market Research Bureau she provided strategic communication and market research consulting for clients. Ivancin has experience with many different audiences addressing all types of communication challenges. Ivancin received her MBA in marketing from the University of Illinois.

Larry Kirkman

Became dean in July 2001. Dean Kirkman came to SOC from the Benton Foundation. At Benton, from 1989, he created programs in strategic communications for nonprofit organizations, public media, and communications policy. Under his direction, Benton became a leading nonprofit Internet publisher, producing online knowledge networks that serve as testbeds for journalism, education and social action. He launched the US Center for www.oneworld.net, and he serves as Chair of the One World International Foundation. He also serves on the Public Issues Advisory Committee of The Advertising Council.

At Benton, Dean Kirkman edited Strategic Communications for Nonprofits, a ten volume set of media guides, and organized the international Advocacy Video Conference. He played a leading role in creating www.connectforkids.org, a major Advertising Council campaign, and www.digitaldividenetwork.org, a hub of information and action for universal service and access to the Internet. As founding director of the Labor Institute of Public Affairs, from 1982 to 1989, he was responsible for the AFL-CIO's Union Yes advertising campaign and public television series, American Works.

From 1979 to 1982, Dean Kirkman set up the TV and video program for the American Film Institute, where he produced the National Video Festival. As an assistant professor in the 1970s, he helped bring the School of Communication into the video age, while serving as editor of Tele Visions magazine and producing independent documentary programs for public television. In the late 60's and early 70's, he was an activist in the development of community media centers and public access channels, and owned Video Works, Inc. a company producing educational videos for government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Kathryn Montgomery

Kathryn Montgomery is a professor in the Public Communication division. She comes to American University with more than 25 years of experience in both the nonprofit field and academe. For 12 years, she was President of the DC-based Center for Media Education (CME), which she co-founded in 1991. During her tenure at CME, Montgomery's research, publications, and testimony helped frame the national public policy debate on a range of critical media issues. She led a coalition of child advocacy, health, and education groups in a series of successful advocacy campaigns, leaving behind a legacy of policies on behalf of children and families. They include: a Federal Communications Commission rule requiring a minimum of three hours per week of educational/informational television programming for children; a content-based ratings system for TV programs; and the first federal legislation to protect children's privacy on the Internet.

Before moving to Washington, D.C., Montgomery was a media studies professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Target: Prime Time - Advocacy Groups and the Struggle over Entertainment Television (Oxford University Press, 1989). Montgomery currently directs the Project on Youth, Media, and Democracy through AU's Center for Social Media. The project's 2004 report, "Youth as E-Citizens," documented the variety of ways that young people are using the Internet for politics and civic engagement. She is also writing a book on youth and digital media for MIT Press. She received her Ph.D. in Motion Pictures and Television from UCLA.