Person
Larry Gross
American communication researcher. Directed Cultural Indicators with Gerbner at the University of Pennsylvania; co-author of the 1976 Violence Profile article. Later a school director at USC.
Biography
Larry Gross is a communication scholar who works on visual communication, art and culture, and on the representation of minorities in the media. He holds degrees from Brandeis University and Columbia University. He joined the University of Pennsylvania as a faculty member in 1968 and worked there until 2003, about 35 years; he became the Sol Worth Professor and associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, and supervised more than 180 master’s and doctoral theses.
His place in the history of cultivation theory is that in the 1970s and 1980s he directed the Cultural Indicators project together with George Gerbner. The best-known product of this partnership is the 1976 article “Living with Television: The Violence Profile”, which gave the first results of cultivation analysis; he is also among the authors of the 1980 article “The ‘Mainstreaming’ of America”.
In 2003 he moved to the University of Southern California (USC) and until 2014 was director of the School of Communication within USC Annenberg. He was president of the International Communication Association (ICA) in 2011–2012 and is a member of the association; he is the founder and editor of the International Journal of Communication. His books include Up from Invisibility (Columbia University Press, 2001), on the representation of lesbian and gay people in American media, and, as co-editor, The Columbia Reader on Lesbians and Gay Men in Media, Society and Politics (1999) and Image Ethics in the Digital Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Penn’s announcement describes the book as a pioneering work in LGBTQ studies. This page contains only publicly available professional information.
In this course
Gerbner’s close colleague; co-author of the Violence Profile. See Cultivation Theory.
Key works
- Gerbner, George; Gross, Larry (1976). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26(2), 172-199. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01397.x — The Violence Profile; the first results of cultivation analysis.
- Gerbner, George; Gross, Larry; Morgan, Michael; Signorielli, Nancy (1980). The “mainstreaming” of America: Violence profile no. 11. Journal of Communication, 30(3), 10-29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1980.tb01987.x — One of the four authors of the mainstreaming article.
- Gerbner, George; Gross, Larry; Morgan, Michael; Signorielli, Nancy (1981). A curious journey into the scary world of Paul Hirsch. Communication Research, 8(1), 39-72. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365028100800102 — One of the four authors of the reply to Hirsch.