Jonathan Auerbach is professor of English at the University of Maryland. In addition to publishing a variety of articles in the field of American studies, and editing a number of volumes, he is the author of four books: The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (Oxford UP, 1989); Male Call: Becoming Jack London (Duke UP, 1996); Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations (U California, 2007), and Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship (Duke UP, 2011). He is currently working on a study of American propaganda and the shaping of public opinion from Teddy to Franklin D. Roosevelt. He has been a Fulbright scholar in Portugal, Cyprus, and Tunisia, and has lectured abroad in Ireland, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Egypt.
The lecture focuses on the institutionalizing of the “science” of public relations by the two self-proclaimed fathers of the field, Edward Bernays and Ivy Ledbetter Lee and especially the career of Ivy Lee, who started out as a publicity consultant for US railroad corporations and Rockefeller and ended up giving advice to Hitler and Goebbels!
The talk will focus on Dewey, particularly his theories of education in relation to the American education today, how it seeks to validate and empower each individual student.
Related materials:
1. Symposium on propaganda, progressivism and cinema
2. John Dewey: “My Pedagogic Creed,” first published in The School Journal, January 16, 1897
