In its first two weeks since it premiered, SOC FMA adjunct professor Max Kaplow’s The Chosen One has become Netflix's #1 non-English TV series in the world, with over 20,000,000 viewing hours recorded thus far.
SOC Political Communication adjunct Adam Konowe was featured on B2BeeMatch's "It's a Small Business World" podcast. His episode included discussion about brand building and reputation management for business-to-business companies, especially small-to-medium enterprises. Konowe, a senior vice president at Edelman, also shared findings and implications from the latest Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report.
Andrew Phelps, director of the AU Game Center, delivered an online lecture as part of the New Zealand Game Developer’s Conference entitled ‘Games, Cinema, Platforms & Interactivity: A Convergence of Media and Opportunity.’ You can find a recording of it available on his website, here.
SOC's Office of Communication and Outreach published a story welcoming SOC's newest faculty: Chelsea Butkowski, Whitney Christopher, Megan Finn, Chung-Wei Huang, Wesley Lowery Aarushi Sahejpal, and Jamie Sisley. The full story is live on our website and is featured on our social media profiles. Special thanks to Tia Milledge and Veronica Castro.
Sherri Williams discussed #BillionGirlSummer, how women dominated pop culture this summer and passed the billion-dollar mark and what that means, with Yahoo! Entertainment: “Beyonce, Barbie director Greta Gerwig and Taylor Swift are ‘giving women examples of empowerment at a time when patriarchy is showing just how lethal it can be,’ said Sherri Williams, assistant professor in race, media and communication at American University in Washington, D.C.”
ABC News' "Nightline" published a six-minute feature story about the Climate Comedy Cohort, a program co-created/co-directed by the Center for Media & Social Impact and Generation180, a clean energy nonprofit. Launched in 2022, the Climate Comedy Cohort brings together leading diverse comedians from around the country to flip the script on the way we think about climate change. The ultimate aim: to leverage humor as a strategy to change the climate narrative from doom and gloom to “we’ve got this!”— and shift how people see their role in clean energy.
American University branding and campus (where CMSI hosted the 2023 Climate Comedy Cohort creative workshop week with comedians and leading climate scientists in April) is featured prominently in the piece (the central AU material starts around 1:47).
Joe Campbell discussed "Making Sense of the '90s" at an invited "Profs and Pints" lecture Monday evening at the Penn Social bar in downtown D.C. Joe's presentation, which drew from his book 1995: The Year the Future Began, was part of a lecture series in which professors deliver talks about their research to informal audiences at off-campus venues like bars and cafes. John C. Watson gave a "Profs and Pints" lecture in late June at the Little Penn coffeehouse in Washington.
This week, Kurt Braddock presented his experimental work on ideological subtext and its capacity for motivating violence to the US Department of Defense and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center at the Counter-Insider Threat Social and Behavioral Science Summit in Arlington. This work was funded, in part, by a RACE Matters grant through SOC, which allowed Kurt access to research participants to test his hypotheses.
This week, Aram Sinnreich's debut novel was released by Solaris Books and distributed by Simon & Schuster. He coauthored it with his sister, the historian Rachel Hope Cleves, under the pen name R.A. Sinn. Though they've published many nonfiction books between them, this is the first literary outing for either. The book is called A SECOND CHANCE FOR YESTERDAY. It’s a time travel science fiction novel, with LGBTQ romance elements.
The book has already gotten a starred review in Publishers Weekly, a rave in Scientific American, and a lovely writeup in Library Journal. There will be a book event featuring both authors and Prof. David Keplinger from the Literature department on Wednesday Sept 6th at 6pm in Mary Graydon Center room 200. You can register here.
Maya Livio spent much of the summer completing the prestigious Caltech-Huntington Residency. There, she gave an invited talk on “Avian AI,” sharing her ongoing research on the use of AI for environmental crises. While in Los Angeles, Maya was also selected to participate in a collective project on land use in Southern California, organized by the Project X Foundation for Art and Criticism. In June, she participated in a roundtable, co-organized by Ros Donald, at the International Environmental Communication Association’s Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE).
And as was just announced, Maya was also awarded CTRL’s Greenberg Building Future Faculty (GBFF) Faculty Fellowship. In this two-year fellowship, she will mentor graduate students across AU to support their pedagogy and journeys through the academic job market.
Benjamin Stokes launched an interactive audio project with the National Women’s History Museum and the DC Public Library. It is part of a larger exhibit (“We Who Believe in Freedom: Black Feminist DC”) that is on view downtown at the newly rebuilt MLK Library. The project combines phone calls with multimedia imagery and provides a national model for libraries to democratize interactive storytelling. It is a project of the AU Game Center and Playful City Lab, built with the Hive Mechanic authoring system that was created at American University. For details, see our full article.
