Paul died Dec. 22, 2018, after a short illness. He was one of our honored immigrants and great teachers. He was the Lev Kuleshov emeritus professor of communication at Penn’s Annenberg School, where he taught for 40 years and enthralled generations of students.

He came to Princeton from his home in Athens, Greece, but after one year in Dod with us we knew that his spirit was American. A Phi Beta Kappa scholar, his thesis, “MIT-FRB Model of the American Economy,” was one of the last overseen by the legendary economist Oskar Morgenstern.

But Paul’s heart lay in communications more than data, and he immediately embarked on his life’s work in media, earning a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at Annenberg. He then taught at the school from 1977 to 2017, focusing first on the evolving field of visual communication with the seminal texts Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality and Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. But he increasingly focused on the creative work of his students, and his undergraduate Visual Communications Lab became a sacred rite for them. On his retirement, the lab itself was renamed the Paul Messaris Media Laboratory. A memorial service will be held at Penn in September.

He is survived by his wife, Carla Sarett, with whom we grieve on Paul’s too-short retirement, but also rejoice in the rich personal gifts he presented to so many.

Undergraduate Class of 1970