Center receives $4 million from Annenberg Foundation

The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) has received a $4 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation to endow one or two fellowships a year for communications scholars. The first Leonore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communications is expected to spend a year in residence beginning in September 2005 or 2006.

"The Annenberg gift is great for the center and great for the field of communications," said center director Doug McAdam, professor of sociology. "It will give us a chance to integrate an important and growing field into our program while giving the very best and most promising scholars in communications a chance to spend a year in the most stimulating interdisciplinary setting available to scholars."

The most recent researcher in communications was Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Packaging the Presidency and The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists and the Stories That Shape the Political World. She spent the 2003-04 fellowship year analyzing political discourse in campaign advertisements and on talk shows.

Founded in 1954, CASBS each year offers about 40 fellows from the social sciences and humanities who study human behavior a sabbatical year in residence. Unlike most academic research grants, residential fellowships are awarded on the basis of accomplishment and scholarly promise rather than proposals for specific projects. The center is independent of Stanford but leases university land next to the golf course.

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