Keynote speakers announced for IHPRC

20 April 2010

Leading historians to set the scene at global PR conference in July.

Two leading historians of public relations – Dr Karen Miller Russell and Dr Jacquie L’Etang – will be the keynote speakers at the First International History of Public Relations Conference (IHPRC) to be held at BU on July 8-9, 2010.

Karen Russell will make the opening address to the conference on Thursday, July 8. Her topic will be ‘Embracing the Embarrassing’, a discussion of propaganda and press agentry as legitimate, if sometimes unethical and embarrassing, aspects of public relations history.

Dr Russell is an associate professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication in the University of Georgia where she teaches public relations and media history.

She is the author of The Voice of Business: Hill & Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) and has published research on public relations and media history in Journalism and Communication Monographs, Public Relations Review, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Business History Review, and the Journal of Public Relations Research.

Dr Russell is currently the editor of the Journal of Public Relations Research and has made more than 25 refereed paper presentations on public relations at major business and journalism history conferences.

Dr Jacquie L’Etang will be the keynote speaker at the start of the second day of IHPRC on Friday, June 9. Her topic will be ‘Thinking about PR History’.

She is Senior Lecturer in the Film, Media & Journalism department at the University of Stirling and a member of the Stirling Media Research Institute.

Dr L’Etang is the author of Public Relations in Britain: a history of professional practice (LEA, 2004) which was the first comprehensive study into the development of the PR industry in the United Kingdom.

It was based on extensive documentary research in the archives of the History of Advertising Trust and oral history interviews with nearly 70 practitioners from the 1940s and 1950s.

Other titles include Public Relations: theory, practice and critique (Sage, 2008), which is being translated into Croatian, Czech and Spanish. She is co-editor and co-author of Public Relations: critical debates and contemporary practice (LEA, 2006) and Critical Perspectives in Public Relations (ITBP, 1996). She is currently writing Sports public relations: concepts, issues, practice and critique (Sage).

Dr L’Etang has also published nearly 40 articles and book chapters (largely individually authored) on research topics including anthropology, corporate social responsibility, ethics of communication, propaganda, public diplomacy, rhetoric, sport and tourism.

Further information about IHPRC can be found at http://historyofpr.com External Link