UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A leading political communication scholar will present the fall 2016 Robert M. Pockrass Memorial Lecture at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28, in Foster Auditorium of Paterno Library on the University Park campus.
Dannagal G. Young’s free public lecture, titled “The Promise and Peril of Political Humor as a Rhetorical Device,” is sponsored by the Penn State College of Communications and University Libraries.
Young is an associate professor at the University of Delaware. Her research on the psychology and influence of political entertainment has been widely published, including articles in Columbia Journalism Review, International Journal of Press/Politics, Mass Communication and Society, Media Psychology and Political Communication.
She is a research fellow with the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication, a distinguished fellow of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and was awarded the University of Delaware’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014. She earned her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
Her talk will explore the content, categories and influence of political humor. Young will present the results of recent experimental work that show different rates of humor appreciation among liberals and conservatives, as mediated through personality traits known to correlate with ideology. She will address the role played by social media in stripping political satire of the context necessary to make sense of it in the way intended by the authors.
The Pockrass Lecture was named after the late Professor Robert M. Pockrass, a member of Penn State’s journalism faculty from 1948 to 1977. Pockrass, who specialized in public opinion and popular culture, served as the graduate officer and taught radio news writing for the School of Journalism, which later became the College of Communications.