On Saturday, May 27, 2017 at 12:30 p.m. in the auditorium (room 120) of List Art, the Library will host a Commencement Forum entitled, “The Impact of Social Media on Politics, Culture, and Scholarly Communication.” This event is free and open to the public.
Social media and other rapidly-evolving digital technologies have changed the way we communicate in all realms of our lives. This panel discussion will focus on the impact of social media on political, cultural, and scholarly communication.
Panelists include:
- David Corn ’81, P’21, American political journalist and author and the chief of the Washington bureau for Mother Jones
- Alissa Quart ‘94, Executive Editor of Economic Hardship Reporting Project and author of Branded, Republic of Outsiders, and other books that mix reportage and cultural theory
- Elias Muhanna, Brown University Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and contributing writer to The New Yorker online
David Corn ’81, P’21
David Corn is a veteran Washington journalist and political commentator. He is the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones magazine and an analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He won the 2012 George Polk award and a National Magazine award for breaking the 47 percent video story that influenced the Obama-Romney presidential contest. For 20 years, he was the Washington editor of The Nation magazine.
Corn writes on a host of subjects, including politics, the White House, Congress and national security. He has broken stories on Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Bill O’Reilly, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Rush Limbaugh, Enron, the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA leak case, corruption in Iraq, the National Rifle Association, the Pentagon, and assorted Washington players and institutions.
Corn has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, Newsday, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, the LA Weekly, the Village Voice, The Independent, Elle, Slate, Salon, and other publications and websites. He has blogged for AOL’s “Politics Daily,” HuffingtonPost.com, CQPolitics.com, and The Guardian. For years he wrote the online column “Capital Games” for TheNation.com.
He is the author of three New York Times best-sellers—Showdown: The Inside Story of How Barack Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party; Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (with Michael Isikoff); and The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception—and the e-book 47 Percent: Uncovering the Romney Video that Rocked the 2012 Election. His novel, Deep Background, was hailed as one of the best novels of the year by Los Angeles Times. Corn is also the author of the biography Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades.
Corn has long been a prominent analyst on television and radio. He regularly appears on Hardball, The Rachel Maddow Show, The Last Word, and other MSNBC shows. For years, he was a Fox News contributor, appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. He was a regular panelist on the weekly television show, Eye On Washington, which was syndicated on PBS stations across the United States. He was a guest host for CNN’s Crossfire and a regular panelist on its Capital Gang. He has appeared on CBS News’ Face the Nation, ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopoulos, PBS’s Newshour and Washington Week in Review, the CBS Evening News, Fox News Sunday, CNN’s Reliable Sources, The McLaughlin Group, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, and many other shows. He is a regular guest on To the Point, a National Public Radio show, and has contributed commentary to NPR, BBC Radio, CBC Radio, and other radio networks in the United States and overseas. He has been a guest on scores of call-in radio programs.
His twitter feed–@DavidCornDC–has 400,000 followers.
Alissa Quart ’94
Alissa Quart is the Executive Editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism non-profit devoted to reporting on inequality. She is also the author of four books including, Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers, and Republic of Outsiders and the poetry book Monetized. Her latest non-fiction book is forthcoming in 2018 from HarperCollins. She has written features for many magazines and has frequently contributed reported opinion pieces to The New York Times and elsewhere. She has also written and produced a number of multimedia projects and video, including the Emmy- and ASME-nominated multimedia project The Last Clinic. Alissa’s poetry has appeared in the London Review of Books. She taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, among other universities, and was a 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
Elias Muhanna
Elias Muhanna is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, and director of the Digital Islamic Humanities Project. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and was a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies in 2015-16. In 2017-18, he will be a Public Engagement Fellow of the Whiting Foundation. His research focuses on encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world and Europe, the cultural production of the Mamluk Empire, and the problem of the vernacular in different literary traditions.
In addition to his scholarship, Muhanna writes frequently for the mainstream press. He is a contributing writer for NewYorker.com, and his essays and criticism have appeared regularly in The New York Times, The Nation, and other periodicals. His blog, Qifa Nabki, is a forum for intellectual exchange and debate on Levantine politics.
Date: Saturday, May 27, 2017
Time: 12:30 p.m.
Location: Room 120, Albert & Vera List Art Building, 64 College Street, Providence