Steven A. Seidman

Steven A. Seidman was born in New York City. He was a public school teacher there for eight years, and taught college and university students for more than thirty-five years. Dr. Seidman recently taught an online undergraduate course on political campaign imagery at Ithaca College, as well as a graduate course on political communication campaigns there. He received his Ph.D. in instructional systems technology from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1982. Dr. Seidman is professor emeritus of communication management and design and formerly chair of the Department of Strategic Communication of Ithaca College's Roy H. Park School of Communication. His interest in election campaigns began when President Dwight D. Eisenhower paraded through his neighborhood in Manhattan in 1956, and he received a poster celebrating Ike's sixty-sixth birthday. An interest in the politics of other countries commenced during a visit to Chile in 1970, when he witnessed the campaign that culminated in the election of Salvador Allende. Dr. Seidman spent four years researching and writing his book, Poster, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History, described by David Welch (Professor of Modern History and Director of the Centre for the Study of Propaganda and War, University of Kent, England) as "the best study of the modern political poster that I have read" and by Lynda Lee Kaid (Professor of Telecommunication in the College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida) as "an outstanding description of how American political campaigns have used political posters." In 2010, it won the Park Faculty Writing Award. Dr. Seidman also was presented with the International Visual Literacy Association's Research Award in 2010--only the ninth recipient of this honor in twenty years.