Terence Moran

Terence Moran

New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Professor of Media Ecology

Phone: 998 5254
Email: tpm1@nyu.edu

• Media, Culture, and Communication
• Media Ecology: Studies in Communication

Terence P. Moran is Professor of Culture and Communication at New York University, where he has taught for forty years.  The co-editor (with Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner) of Language in America, he is the author of numerous articles on language, media and propaganda in both academic and popular publications.  He is also a writer and/or producer of documentaries on such diverse subjects as career women in New York City (City Originals:  Women Making It Work, 1994), the conflict in Northern Ireland (Sons of Derry, 1993), and the cultural history of McSorley’s Old Ale House (McSorley’s New York, 1987), for which he shared a New York Area Emmy Award for Outstanding Arts/Cultural/Historical Programming.

A son and grandson of Irish immigrants, he is a born-in-Brooklyn native New Yorker who has lived in Greenwich Village since 1966.  After dropping out of high school and working for two years, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, serving four years on active duty (1955-1959) and two years in the Ready Reserves (1959-61).  A rifleman and combat draftsman/illustrator, he was stationed at Parris Island, South Carolina, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia (with a seventeen day assignment to NATO in Paris, France in 1957).  Discharged as a sergeant with a Good Conduct Medal and an Expert Rifleman Medal, he returned to Brooklyn and enrolled in New York University in 1960.  He earned his bachelor’s degree (cum laude) in 1964, his master’s degree in 1965 and his Ph.D. degree in 1971.

In the early 1970, he was a founder of the First Friday, a largely Irish and Irish-American group who meet every first Friday for lunch and talk in Sundry Manhattan saloons.  In time, a number of writers became regulars or semi-regular – Jimmy Beslin, Thomas Keneally Cahill, Vincent Dowling, John Gregory Dunne, James T. Farrell, Thomas Flanagan, Thomas Keneally, William Kennedy, Frank and Malachy McCourt, Peter and Tom Dunne, and Dennis Smith.

Each year on March 17^th, he can be found with his beautiful wife, Elise, marching up Fifth Avenue with the New York City Council in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.  On June 16^th, he is a reader for Symphony Space’s “Bloomsday in Broadway,” an annual tribute to James Joyce’s Ulysses. 

At the end of the day, Moran can be identified by three labels:  Irish-American, Native New Yorker, and Marine.