ISP Announces New Fall 2018 Graduate Course: “Strategic Communications for National Security”

News | July 31, 2018

During the 2018 fall semester, the Intelligence Studies Project and the LBJ School of Public Affairs will offer graduate students the opportunity to learn about the history and modern practice of strategic communications with a focus on how governments use information campaigns to shape foreign perceptions of national security issues. The course, PA 388K, will be led by Dr. Alan Kessler and is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students who have an interest in foreign perceptions of the United States and public diplomacy initiatives to inform, influence, and persuade the foreign publics to support – or at least to not actively oppose – US national security objectives. 

More information about this course can be accessed here.

To register for the course, please contact ISP affiliate and LBJ Resident Intelligence Officer, Alan Kessler (alan.kessler@austin.utexas.edu).  


Screen Shot 2018 07 31 at 3.25.13 PMAlan Kessler, PhD, is a Resident Intelligence Officer at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. As an officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Analysis (DA), he drafted a wide range of analytic products on strategic communications to support US public diplomacy and developed new methods to assess the effectiveness of technical collection platforms for senior intelligence community and policy customers. Prior to serving in the DA, Dr. Kessler taught courses on international relations and foreign policy as a faculty member of the Government Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and has advanced degrees in political science from the University of Michigan and UCLA.