In the shadows of the fifth floor archives in the Gannett Center at Ithaca College lies an untouched, unaltered screenplay by Rod Serling. The original script for an episode of the television series “The United States Steel Hour”, titled “Noon on Doomsday”, is more than 50 years old and has never been seen by the public eye — until now.

The screenplay will come alive during a table reading as part of The Life and Legacy of Rod Serling, a conference honoring one of the school’s most revered faculty members. The conference is organized by a committee from the Roy H. Park School of Communications and the Department of Theatre Arts.

“We’re looking to move the scholarship about Serling forward,” said Ithaca College Library Archivist Bridget Bower. “He did significant things in the 20th century that still have an impact on us.”

The conference will be held in the Park Auditorium on Friday and Saturday and will feature readings from Serling’s scripts, panel discussions and screenings from his television anthology, “The Twilight Zone”.

Though Rod Serling contributed to many acclaimed feature films, such as “Planet of the Apes” and “Seven Days in May”, his most renowned creation was “The Twilight Zone”. The television series, which Serling also hosted, aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963 and perplexed viewers with its originality and shocking endings.

From 1967 to 1975, Serling taught a specialty course at the college that focused on dramatic writing while John Keshishoglou, a professor emeritus who hired Serling as a professor in 1968, was dean of the school. Keshishoglou will be this year’s keynote speaker.

“I invited him to come and do a guest lecture for my one hour film production class” Keshishoglou said. “He and the students enjoyed it so much, he ended up staying for two and a half hours.”

The conference will also include a multimedia analysis of “The Twilight Zone”’s impact on American pop culture, said Melissa Gattine, the Park School public relations coordinator and one of the conference’s organizers. Like in years past, the college will show several episodes of “The Twilight Zone,” each one accompanied with introductions and script theme analysis.

Gattine said the first conference in 2006 was so successful that they decided to make it a biennial tradition moving forward.

“The conference we had two years ago had a really wonderful mix of people,” Gattine said. “They were academics who teach writings [and] theories behind his writings, as well as students, members of the community and a good mix of people who appreciated his work.”

Gattine said many Serling enthusiasts have long anticipated an event where they could publicly recover some of Serling’s work from the Rod Serling Archives, a collection of television scripts, stage play scripts, movie screenplays and scripts that were donated to the Ithaca College Archives in the summer of 1997.

“We’ve been talking for a long time about how to let everyone know about the archives,” Gattine said. “It seems like this is the perfect place — where he’s from — to capitalize and bring in scholars and writers.”

Serling’s widow, Carol, who will also participate in this year’s conference, said she was involved in the early discussions.

“I’m just happy that they decided to do it again,” Serling said. “It was a tremendous honor, and I think my husband would have been pleased.”

Gattine, Keshishoglou and Bower are members of the committee responsible for producing this conference. The committee also includes Barbara Audet, assistant professor of journalism; Gordon Webb, retired professor of television-radio; Ari Kissiloff, assistant professor of strategic communication; and Laurie Ward, manager of marketing services. Jeffrey Tangeman, professor of theater arts and member of the board, will direct the table read of “Noon on Doomsday”.

This year’s conference will feature a reading from the Serling Script Writing Competition, in which contestants submitted scripts written in the style of “The Twilight Zone”.

There will also be a presentation from members of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, based in Binghamton, N.Y.

There will be a conference dinner for a select group of participants featuring a video of Serling teaching at Ithaca College, followed by a panel of former students who will discuss having Serling as a professor.

Keshishoglou said Serling had a strong desire to help students with their endeavors.

“He just couldn’t say no to anyone, especially students here,” Keshishoglou said.