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By Kim Cretors
kcretors@uga.edu
The George Foster Peabody Awards and the Center for Humanities and Arts have announced a joint  lecture series that will bring Peabody Award winners to campus. The Center for Humanities and Arts Peabody Lecture will feature past Peabody winners who will visit classes and deliver public lectures. Lectures will be given during fall and spring semesters.
“The CHA-Peabody Lecture will not only bring to the university some of the most talented contributors to the radio and television arts but will also reinforce in the public consciousness the association of the Peabody Awards with the University of Georgia,” says Betty Jean Craige, University Professor of Comparative Literature and director of the Center for Humanities and Arts.
“We are delighted to join the Center for Humanities and Arts in sponsoring a lecture series that will bring Peabody winners to campus,” says interim Peabody Director Louise Benjamin. “The winners represent the best in the broadcast and cable industries, and our students will benefit tremendously from interacting with these talented individuals.”
Since its inception, there have been more than 1,200 Peabody Award winners, ranging from independent radio producers and small-market television stations to network entities and cable programmers. Recent winners include Christiane Amanpour, Bill Moyers, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey and Ted Turner.
The inaugural CHA-Peabody Lecture will be given by David Isay, founder of Sound Portraits, an independent, not-for-profit radio production company dedicated to bringing neglected American voices to a national audience. The lecture is scheduled for Jan. 31 in Ramsey Hall in the Performing Arts Center.
Isay is a two-time Peabody Award-winning producer whose work is featured regularly on National Public Radio. He is the recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Robert Kennedy Awards. Several books have been published based on his radio projects, including Flophouse: Life on the Bowery and Holding On. His most recent radio documentary, “Witness to an Execution: A Day in the Life of a Death Row Employee,” aired on NPR’s All Things Considered on Oct. 12 this year.
Celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, the Peabody Awards recognize distinguished achievement in radio, television and cable programming. The awards have been administered by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia since the program’s inception in 1940.
The Center for Humanities and Arts promotes scholarly inquiry and creative activity in the humanities and the arts by supporting faculty research grants, lectures, symposia, publications, visiting scholars, visiting artists and public programs, exhibitions, performances and collaborative instruction.
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