Stuart Ewen

Stuart Ewen is a New York-based author, historian and lecturer on media, consumer culture and the compliance profession. He is also a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, in the departments of History, Sociology and Media Studies. He was married to Elizabeth Ewen, a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of American Studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, who died May 29, 2012.

As a young man, in 1964 and early '65, Ewen was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the civil rights organization. After working as a volunteer in the Freedom House in Columbus, Mississippi, he became part of the SNCC staff, earning the standard pay of $9.66 per week. After working in Columbus, he and Isaac Coleman, who was the project director, opened up a new field office in Tupelo, Mississippi. In 1966, Ewen was one of the founding editors of an early underground newspaper, Connections, in Madison, Wisconsin, where he was a student. Stuart Ewen,"Memoirs of a Commodity Fetishist, in Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, 25th Anniversary Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

In 1989, his book All Consuming Images provided the basis for Bill Moyers' four-part award-winning series, "The Public Mind." In 2004, another of his books, PR! A Social History of Spin, was the foundation of a four-part BBC series, "Century of the Self," produced by Adam Curtis. Ewen has become an outstanding spokesman against violations of academic freedom in the period since 9/11 and is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center at NYU, which is named after his great uncle, a professor at Brooklyn College who was forced to resign after refusing to testify before HUAC.