Roderick P. Hart, former dean of the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, has joined the Annenberg Public Policy Center as a visiting scholar for the fall 2015 semester.
Hart, director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at UT-Austin and dean of the university’s Moody College from 2004 to 2015, is a communication scholar with a specialty in politics and mass media. He is the author of a dozen books, including “Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why” (University of Chicago, 2013) and “Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good for Us” (Princeton University Press, 2000). He also is the author of the computer program DICTION 7.0, which analyzes textual language patterns.
During the fall term at APPC, Hart will be working on his latest project, a book exploring the idea of civic hope and the possibility of democracy as expressed by ordinary citizens in a dozen small cities in the United States over nearly 70 years.
Hart joins two other visiting scholars in residence at the policy center this fall: Dietram A. Scheufele, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is leading research at APPC in the Science of Science Communication, and Jo Holz, a former executive at the Nielsen Company who is writing a sociocultural history of American children’s television.
