Pockrass Lecture to focus on social networking sites

Pockrass Lecture to focus on social networking sites

Zizi Papacharissi

Zizi Papacharissi, a leading scholar of online media, will present the spring 2010 Robert M. Pockrass Memorial Lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, April 12, in the HUB-Robeson Center auditorium at Penn State's University Park campus.

Her free public lecture, titled "Social Media, Social People: Emerging Sociabilities and Social Network Sites," is sponsored by the College of Communications.

Papacharissi is a professor and head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media.

Her forthcoming book, "A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age," discusses how online media redefine public and private in late-modern democracies. She also is completing an edited volume on online social networks, titled "The Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites."

Papacharissi is the author of three books and more than 30 journal articles, book chapters or reviews. She earned her doctoral degree at the University of Texas.

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.