Charisse L’Pree named Newhouse Endowed Chair of Public Communications

Charisse L’Pree Corsbie-Massay, associate professor of communications at the Newhouse School, has been named the Newhouse Endowed Chair of Public Communications for 2022-25. The position is awarded to a distinguished faculty member whose accomplishments significantly advance the school’s reputation in research and creative activity.

L’Pree holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Southern California, where she also earned a master’s degree in critical studies in cinema and television. She earned bachelor’s degrees in comparative media studies and brain and cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

L’Pree investigates how users think about themselves and others via media. Her work includes articles in Psychological Inquiry, AIDS and Behavior and Journal of Applied Communication Research, as well as book chapters addressing serious games, race and gender methodology and media use among marginalized populations. Her most recent book, “Twentieth Century Media and the American Psyche” (Routledge, 2021), describes how our relationships with media emulate interpersonal relationships through their ability to replicate intimacy, regularity and reciprocity.

L’Pree, who was awarded Teacher of the Year from the graduating class of 2017, teaches classes on communication and diversity to professional media students. The courses focus on the ways in which media affect our understanding of different social categories and how the social categories of media producers affect the media with which we all engage. She also hosted Newhouse’s Annual Conversation on Race and Entertainment Media from 2014-2022. Her upcoming book, “Diversity and Satire: Laughing at Processes of Marginalization,” will be published by Wiley later this year.

As chair, L’Pree will work on her project “America Dreaming: A Repository of Dreams in the 21st Century.” Although coined at the start of the 20th century, the American Dream has been present since the discovery and colonization of the “New World” and has since defined much of the history of the United States. The project will explore the meaning of the American Dream in the 21st century by collecting, collating and synthesizing American Dreams organized around contemporary social issues.

The resulting online resource will serve as an ongoing space for understanding the evolving American Dream by inviting stories from people worldwide to promote well-being through media representation.