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Donna Hoffman, associate professor of management, Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University

Document Date: March 20, 1996

DONNA HOFFMAN, PH.D. Homepage: http://elab.vanderbilt.edu/about/faculty/dhoffman.htm

Professor Donna Hoffman is an expert witness for the ACLU in ACLU v. Reno, the first major legal challenge to censorship on the Internet.

Donna Hoffman is a tenured associate professor of management in the marketing division at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University and the co-director of Project 2000, a research center at the Owen School.

Project 2000 was conceived and launched by Professor Hoffman and Professor Thomas P. Novak in the spring of 1994. The Project 2000 Center is devoted to the study of the business implications of commercializing the World Wide Web and other emerging computer-mediated environments.

During the summer of 1995, Professor Hoffman participated in the formal criticism of both the now-discredited Marty Rimm study on marketing pornography on the Internet and the Time magazine “cyberporn” cover story on same. With Professor Novak, she established the “Cyberporn Debate Page” to facilitate this work.

Professors Hoffman and Novak also co-authored a critique of the Marty Rimm article (cited by the Department of Justice in defense of the CDA!) purporting to document the extent of “pornography” on the Internet., and a critique of the Time magazine article citing the Rimm study .

In recognition, Internet World named Professors Hoffman and Novak Internet Heroes for 1995 and Newsweek named Professor Hoffman one of the “50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet” for 1995.

To date, Professor Hoffman has published 27 refereed journal articles, book chapters, invited journal articles, conference proceedings, and articles in the popular media on these themes. In 1994 and 1995, she presented more than 13 invited papers on the Internet and Web-based commerce at various conferences and invited seminars.

In 1995 and again this summer Professor Hoffman will be a Visiting Scholar at Interval Research Corporation, Paul Allen’s $100 million high-technology think thank, where she will study issues relating to the commercialization of new media.

Professor Hoffman received an A.B. in psychology from the University of California at Davis in 1978, and an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1984) in quantitative psychology from the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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