Martha Joynt Kumar Presents: Managing the Message: The White House Communications Operation

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

TIME: Bar opens - 11:30am; Lunch - 12:15pm; Presentation and Q & A - 1pm-2pm
PRICE: $10 Lecture only; $20 Members, $30 Non-members (includes lunch)
EVENT TYPE: Speaker Luncheon

Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University, has been mistaken for a reporter as she sits among media personnel in the White House press and briefing rooms. Of course, as a scholar, she is a reporter in the literal sense--though she reports to her students and to those who read her books instead of to a print or electronic medium.

Dr. Kumar is noted as the foremost scholar of the interactions between the President and the press. She has studied administrations from Gerald Ford’s to Barack Obama’s. Kumar says that she wants to help each administration learn from the communication mistakes of his or her predecessors. She is the director of the White House Transition Project, a non-partisan activity by scholars who have prepared information on White House operations and presidential transitions.

Professor Kumar has received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts. She has been a fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard and honored by the University System of Maryland. She teaches an interactive course in which she interviews White House officials and reporters in Washington, with her students in Towson connected via the Internet. She earned a BA from Connecticut College and an MA and a Ph. D. from Columbia University.

Managing the Message won an award in 2008 from the American Political Science Association as the best book on the presidency.

The book will be available for purchase and signing.