Want fewer ads?

Stuart Ewen is a New York-based author, historian and lecturer on media, consumer culture and the compliance profession. He is also a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, in the departments of History, Sociology and Media Studies. He is married to Elizabeth Ewen, who is a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of American Studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.

As a young man, in 1964 and early '65, Ewen was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the civil rights organization. After working as a volunteer in the Freedom House in Columbus, Mississippi, he became part of the SNCC staff, earning the standard pay of $9.66 per week. After working in Columbus, he and Isaac Coleman, who was the project director, opened up a new field office in Tupelo, Mississippi. In 1966, Ewen was one of the founding editors of an early underground newspaper, Connections, in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was a student. Stuart Ewen,"Memoirs of a Commodity Fetishist, in Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

In 1989, his book All Consuming Images provided the basis for Bill Moyers' four-part award-winning series, "The Public Mind." In 2004, another of his books, PR! A Social History of Spin, was the foundation of a four-part BBC series, "Century of the Self," produced by Adam Curtis. Ewen has become an outstanding spokesman against violations of academic freedom in the period since 9/11 and is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center at NYU, which is named after his great uncle, a professor at Brooklyn College who was forced to resign after refusing to testify before HUAC.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Stuart Ewen", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0