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Media organizations requesting interviews or appearances should contact Sherine B. Walton, Deputy Director at sbwalton@usc.edu,
Tel: (213) 821-2078
University Professor and Chair, USC Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership
For more than 30 years, Geoffrey Cowan has been an important force in almost every facet of the communication world - as a public interest lawyer, academic administrator, best-selling author and award-winning teacher, playwright, television producer, and government official.
From 1996-2007, he was dean of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, which includes USC's School of Journalism and USC's School of Communication. The Annenberg School has a full-time faculty of more than 60 and nearly 1,900 graduate and undergraduate students.
In 2007, he was named a University Professor and the inaugural holder of the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership at the Annenberg School and director of the School's Center on Communication Leadership. He holds a joint appointment in the USC Gould School of Law, teaches courses in journalism, mass media law, public diplomacy, and communication leadership, and is directly involved in the work and research of a number of major centers and projects at the Annenberg School, including the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, which he founded, the Norman Lear Center, the Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities and the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.
Cowan wrote See No Evil: The Backstage Battle Over Sex and Violence on Television (Simon & Schuster, 1980), and the best-selling The People v. Clarence Darrow: The Bribery Trial of America's Greatest Lawyer (Times Books, 1993).
Prior to becoming dean, Cowan served the nation as director of the Voice of America. He was appointed to the position by President Clinton in March 1994. He served as the 22nd director of the VOA, the international broadcasting service of the U.S. Information Agency, broadcasting nearly 900 hours of programming in 52 languages, to a weekly audience of about 100 million. He also served as Director of the International Broadcasting Bureau, with responsibility for WORLDNET TV and Radio & TV Marti as well as VOA.
Cowan previously taught communication law and policy at UCLA, where he was founding director of the university's Center for Communication Policy. He was honored with several teaching awards during his 20 years at UCLA.
Concurrently with his teaching at UCLA, Cowan was a television producer. He received an Emmy Award as executive producer of the television movie Mark Twain & Me, which was voted the Outstanding Prime Time Program for Children by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
From 1979-84, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, playing a key role in the development of National Public Radio.
He co-wrote the radio play, Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, which won CPB's Gold Medal for Excellence in Best Live Entertainment. A major production of the play was presented at 25 venues around the country during the past year, along with seminars designed to explore the sometimes delicate balance between the press, public's right to know, and the government's need to protect some vital national secrets.
He served as chairman of the Los Angeles commission that wrote the city's ethics and campaign finance law-cited as a model for the nation-for which he was awarded "Man of the Year" by the Council of Government Ethics Leaders. He also chaired the California Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices.
He serves on the boards of the Center Theatre Group, California HealthCare Foundation, Children Now, Common Sense Media, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. He was recently elected as the Walter Lippmann Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He is served as a Special Editor and wrote two articles for a special issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on "Public Diplomacy in the 21st Century," to be published in March, 2008.
During the fall of 2007, Cowan was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy where he worked on issues involving new business models for news and wrote a study called "Leading the Way to Better News: How The Powers that Be became the Powers that Were."
He spent four years as principal owner of the Stockton Ports, a Class A farm team for the Milwaukee Brewers. During that time the Ports won two championships and held the best overall record of any team in professional baseball.
He is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. He is married to Aileen Adams, former Secretary of State and Consumer Affairs for the State of California and former director of the Justice Department's Office for Victims of Crime. She has also served USC as a Vice-Provost and as the Director of Arts and Cultural Outreach. They have two children, Gabriel and Mandy.
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