For Immediate Release

Contact:         Maryjane Briant
                        News and Media Relations Director
                        Galloway, N.J. 08205
                        Maryjane.Briant@stockton.edu
                        (609) 652-4593
                        stockton.edu/media

Galloway, N.J. - In an election year like no other, the public is invited to attend upcoming lectures at Stockton University on the status of women in politics and the history of presidential spin, presented by two nationally known experts.

Kelly Dittmar, an assistant professor of Political Science at Rutgers University - Camden and scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics, will speak Tuesday, Oct. 4 at 2:30 p.m., in the Board of Trustees room in the Campus Center. Her lecture is titled “When Ceilings Break, Walls Still Stand: The Status of Women in American Politics in 2016.”

Dittmar is the author of Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns, published by Temple University Press in 2015. Dittmar’s research focuses on the ways in which gender informs political campaigns and the impact of gender diversity among elites who make policy and political decisions.

David Greenberg, a professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, will discuss “A History of Presidential Spin” on Thursday, Oct. 27 at 4:30 p.m. in the Campus Center Theatre.

Greenberg, an author and contributing editor to Politico Magazine, formerly worked as a journalist, including a stint as managing editor of The New Republic. He is a frequent commentator in the national news media, specializing in American political and cultural history. His new book, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency, covers over 100 years of politics and the growth of White House public relations. 

Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, Greenberg’s first book, won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award, the American Journalism History Award, and Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Award.

These lectures, which are co-sponsored by the School of Arts and Humanities and Stockton’s Political Engagement Project (PEP), are just two of PEP’s election campaign-related activities of this fall. PEP is part of the national, multi-campus American Democracy Project (ADP). The aim of PEP and ADP is to foster life-long engaged citizenship, a crucial component of a thriving democracy.

Students also are conducting a voter registration drive, holding presidential debate-watching parties, and attending lectures by Stockton professors on the electoral college process, foreign policy, New Jersey politics and the congressional elections.

Other events have included a Sept. 21 Constitution Day speech, “The Supreme Court and the Constitution: What's at Stake in the 2016 Election,”  by Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, and a panel discussion by students who attended the Republican and Democratic parties’ national conventions.

For more information, visit Stockton.edu/pep.