Pamela Newkirk

Pamela Newkirk, PhD, is an award-winning journalist and multifaceted scholar whose work addresses the historical exclusion of multidimensional portraits of African descendants in scholarship and popular culture. Her latest book  Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, (HarperCollins) examines how prevalent and pernicious racial attitudes  contributed to the 1906 exhibition of a young Congolese man in the Bronx Zoo monkey house. Spectacle was listed among the Best Books of 2015 by NPR, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post Black Voices and The Root, and won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Literature and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation Legacy Award.  Newkirk is the editor of Letters from Black America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009);  and A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters (Doubleday 2004). and is the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, (NYU Press 2000). The book, which examines how race overtly and covertly influences news coverage, won the National Press Club Award for Media Criticism.  Dr. Newkirk holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University and Columbia University, respectively, and is professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur Carter Journalism Institute. She previously worked at four successive news organizations, including New York Newsday where she was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team.  Her articles on media, race and African American art and culture have appeared  in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation and Artnews.