Wednesday, April 16, 2025 - 4 p.m.
Hamilton Smith 205
Please join us for the annual John T. Holden Lecture as we welcome Dr. Banet-Weiser of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "Believability: Sexual Violence and Trial by Media" will explore the relationship between media and sexual violence, arguing that the contemporary digital media context is the space for newly configured struggles over how, whether, and when different forms of evidence regarding sexual violence ought to bolster believability—especially now that such evidence can be freely circulated online, and highly public bids for belief are made without arbitration or intervention by the state.
Sarah Banet-Weiser is the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and also its Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (C3). Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship, and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism.
The Holden Lecture is supported by the John T. Holden Memorial Fund in the College of Liberal Arts, which was established in 1995 in memory of John Holden, one of the university’s outstanding teachers of political science, who served that department for 25 years, many as chair. The fund is dedicated to bringing signal scholars in the social sciences to UNH.
