Robert Kerr

Assistant Professor

Office: 3519 Gaylord Hall

Phone: (405) 325-5219

E-Mail: rkerr@ou.edu

Education

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD)
• University of Oklahoma (MA)
  
• Southern Arkansas University (BA)
  

Background

Robert Kerr spent 20 years reporting and editing for daily newspapers in Memphis, Las Vegas, and Texarkana before beginning his teaching career. OU Students voted him the 2004 recipient of the Gaylord College Teaching Award.

Prof. Kerr’s First Amendment research focuses on legal and public-policy issues involved in maintaining a truly free marketplace of ideas for citizens in an age when corporate and government voices have grown more powerful than ever. His The Rights of Corporate Speech: Mobil Oil and the Legal Development of the Voice of Big Business, published in 2005 by LFB Scholarly, analyzes the way that Mobil made The New York Times op-ed page the focus of its 1970s advocacy strategy to advance an ideology of corporate citizenship in public opinion and in law.

Prof. Kerr has also published recent articles in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Communication Law and Policy, and American Journalism. The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication awarded him the 2005 Baskett Mosse Award for Faculty Development in support of research for his next book.