<div>Award-winning director and producer Davis Guggenheim ’86 will deliver the eighth annual Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture at Brown University on Monday, May 5, 2008. His talk, titled “Can Movies Be an Agent for Social Change?,” will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching, Room 101. It is free and open to the public.</div><div></div>

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] - Davis Guggenheim ’86, director and executive producer of 2007's Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," will deliver the eighth annual Casey Shearer Memorial Lecture on Monday, May 5, 2008, at 6:30 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching, Room 101.

The presentation, titled "Can Movies Be an Agent for Social Change?," is free and open to the public. Guggenheim will discuss how documentaries and feature films have succeeded, and too often have failed, in their attempt to make social progress.

The lectureship, sponsored by Brown University and the Goldway/Shearer family, was established in memory of Casey Shearer, a promising young writer and aspiring sportscaster who died in May 2000, days before he was to graduate from Brown. Previous speakers have been Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer A. Scott Berg, ESPN anchor Chris Berman '77, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, ABC analyst Cokie Roberts, Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell and Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund.

Prior to the lecture, the winners of the annual Casey Shearer Memorial Award for Excellence in Creative Nonfiction will be announced.

Davis Guggenheim

Davis Guggenheim directed and executive produced the 2007 Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which featured former Vice President Al Gore and garnered worldwide box office reciepts of more than $50 milion. Guggenheim has been a producer and director on the Emmy Award-winning HBO series Deadwood as well as such critically acclaimed series as The Unit, The Shield, Alias, 24, NYPD Blue, ER and Party of Five.

Casey Shearer

Casey Shearer ’00 was a vibrant and talented member of the Brown community. An economics concentrator, he also studied Spanish, political science and literature, and helped revive Brown Student Radio (WBSR). He was best known on campus as the station's play-by-play sports announcer and as the author of the weekly sports column "On the Case," published in the College Hill Independent.

Shearer was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif., where his mother, Ruth Goldway, once served as mayor. He graduated from high school in Finland, where his father, Derek Shearer, an Occidental College professor, served as U.S. ambassador. A top student at Brown, Shearer was a member of the economics honor society and received his magna cum laude pin the Friday before he was to graduate. That same day, during a regular pick-up game of basketball, Shearer's heart stopped and he collapsed. Four days later, he died of an undetected heart virus, two months before his 22nd birthday.

For more information on the lecture, contact the Office of University Events at (401) 863-2474.