2024 Honors Convocation

Dear Honors Graduates, Family and Friends, 

I am delighted to invite you to Harwood Arena on Friday, May 3, where we will celebrate your outstanding academic accomplishments as an undergraduate student at Kean University. At this event, you will hear from our Salutatorian, from our invited speaker, and from other well-wishers on hand to applaud your well-earned honors diplomas. This webpage will provide you with all of the information you need to get the most out of this event. 

Though I want to save most of my thoughts about your achievements for the ceremony, I want you to know right now how proud I am of each and every one of you for the talent and resilience you have brought to your studies since becoming a student at Kean. The honors designation that we are celebrating is evidence that you have brought an extra measure of determination to your work, excelling in your studies and taking the very best advantage of everything that a Kean University education has to offer. Believe me, lots of people have noticed, as will the graduate schools to which many of you will apply and the employers, now or later, who will consider your applications. You have proven that you have what it takes to succeed at a very high level of accomplishment, and that is why we devote Honors Convocation to you. 

I very much look forward to meeting you. Congratulations! 

Warm regards,

David S. Birdsell, Ph.D.

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Alison Griffiths, Ph.D., is an internationally renowned scholar of film, media, and visual studies and Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York and a member of the doctoral faculty in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of the multiple award-winning Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (Columbia, 2002), Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Columbia, 2008) and Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (Columbia, 2016) as well as over 60 journal articles and book chapters. In 2022, she was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Arctic Studies to Norway and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. Her research has also been supported by the NEH, ACLS, The Waterhouse Family Institute, the Institute for Citizens and Fellows, the Eugene Lang and Felix Gross Foundations, and the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. Her latest book, Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.