DuPont turns 150: Notions of Responsible Citizenship as Reflected in Corporate Sponsored Public Relations
DuPont turns 150: Notions of Responsible Citizenship as Reflected in Corporate Sponsored Public Relations
Please join us for a conversation on "Citizen DuPont turns 150: Corporate Culture as Public Culture," with Taylor Currie of Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario.
Monday, April 17th
12:00pm-2:00pm
2120 Francis Scott Key Hall
On July 18th, 1952, employees and friends of the Du Pont Company gathered on the banks of the Brandywine River near Wilmington, Delaware for the company’s 150th anniversary celebrations. Company festivities and sponsored media surrounding the anniversary date explicitly linked the history of the company with the history of the nation, in an attempt to legitimatize the company’s existence and its ultraconservative worldview. This paper will explore this conflation of private and public history in Du Pont-sponsored anniversary materials to illustrate how corporate public relations meant for private corporate consumption reverberates into public culture.
Taylor Alexandra Currie is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, under the supervision of Dr. Jeffrey Brison and Dr. Blaine Allan. After completing her MA in History at Queen’s, she decided to take the plunge into the world of interdisciplinarity to better facilitate her exploration of the construction of corporate image through public relations during the twentieth century. A visiting Fulbright scholar, her research on the Du Pont Company is currently being supervised by Dr. David Sicilia at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Lunch will be served. In order to help us estimate attendance, please RSVP at millercenter@umd.edu or 301-405-4299.