Office: Gaylord Hall 3519
Email: rkerr@ou.edu
Education:
PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
MA, University of Oklahoma
BA, Southern Arkansas University
Robert Kerr is a professor at Gaylord College. Kerr's First Amendment research focuses on legal and public-policy issues involved in maintaining a truly free marketplace of ideas for citizens in an age when corporate and government voices have grown more powerful than ever. His secondary research agenda focuses on media narratives influential in shaping the course of sports-media history. He was the most honored participant over the first decade of this millennium in national research competitions of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, a 2010 Musambira and Nesta study documented.
Kerr teaches Media Law and Media History at OU. Gaylord College students have twice voted him recipient of the Gaylord College Teaching Award. He has been named a Presidential Professor by OU and the winner of the National Communication Association's Franklyn S. Haiman Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Freedom of Expression. He was the keynote speaker at the 2019 Oklahoma County Bar Association’s annual Law Day Banquet.
Among his four scholarly books, The Corporate Free-Speech Movement: Cognitive Feudalism and the Endangered Marketplace of Ideas (2008), foreshadowed the 2008 economic crisis in global markets, as well as the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC that removed virtually all limits on corporate media spending in political-candidate campaigns. His How Postmodernism Explains Football, and Football Explains Postmodernism (2015) received the Communication and Sport Division’s Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association in 2017. His work has been honored in ten national research competitions.
