Geoffrey Cowan
University Professor and holder of the annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership
B.A., Harvard University; LL.B., Yale University.
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.
Since 1996, he has been dean of the Unversity of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, which includes a School of Journalism and a School of Communication. The School has a full-time faculty of more than 60 and nearly 1,900 gradate and undergraduate students.
He is the former director of the Voice of America and associate director of the United States Information Agency and director of the International Broadcasting Bureau. Earlier, he founded the Center for Law and Social Policy, a public interest agency which has represented civil rights groups, women's organizations, labor unions, and environmentalists in landmark FCC proceedings.
In July 2001, Professor Cowan was appointed by Governor Gray Davis to a bipartisan commission on Internet political practices. He moderated a three-day Aspen Institute conference on media pluralism in Santiago, Chile in March 2001 and a videoconference of the Council on Foreign Relations with participants in New York City and Los Angeles in February 2001.
In 2006, he was named the inaugural holder of the Annenberg Family Chair in Communication Leadership at the Annenberg Shool and director of the School's Center on Communication Leadership.
