Fall 2006: News, Events & Faculty Publications
A Tragic Loss: Professor Ellen Willis
The Department of Journalism mourns the death, November 9, 2006, of our friend and colleague, Professor Ellen Willis. Some of the many remembrances: The New York Times, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Observer.
NYU Journalism Distinguished Speakers Forum
This fall, the Journalism Department kicked off its Distinguished Speakers Forum, featuring weekly talks and panel discussions with the most influential journalists of our time. The Journalism Department is excited to recognize these leaders for their extraordinary work and lifelong contributions to the field. Each semester you can hear award-winning writers, broadcasters, photographers and filmmakers discuss current projects, events in the news, and the way they approach their craft. Check the Events page on our website early in the semester for a current schedule of Distinguished Speaker (and other) events.
This semester’s speakers were:
- Lawrence Wright, a writer for The New Yorker, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11.
- Gay Talese, discussing his new book, A Writer’s Life.
- Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine on the Bush White House.
- Editor Stan Tiner and Reporter Joshua Norman of the Biloxi Sun Herald, recipients of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service for their reporting on (and from) Hurricane Katrina.
- “War Photography: A Mission For The Ages”, featuring award-winning photojournalists Ron Haviv, Rita Leistner, Moises Saman, Farah Nosh and Timothy Fadek.
InsideOut, A SHERP Speaker Series
Four world-class journalists will participate in this semester’s “Inside Out” speaker series, which began a year ago and is sponsored by NYU Journalism’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP). Our guests will dissect and defend their best work in a casual setting that encourages probing questions. As he did last year, Robert Lee Hotz of the Los Angeles Times, a distinguished writer in residence in the journalism department, will help facilitate the discussions.
This semester’s speakers were:
- Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker takes the world’s temperature (hint: it’s warming).
- Michael Lemonick of Time magazine travels to the end of the universe - and the beginning.
- Author Deborah Blum goes ghost hunting with the greatest minds of the 19th Century.
- Laura Chang, science editor of The New York Times, deconstructs today’s Science Times.
Darwin, “Design” and the Reporter’s Dilemma
This spring the Department and SHERP hosted a discussion featuring a leader of the Intelligent Design movement, one of his most prominent critics, and the national religion correspondent from The New York Times. Listen to the discussion online!
Faculty Publishing
Prof. William E. Burrows’ latest book, The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth, discusses in depth the ways in which space and its exploration can and should be used to protect the future of humanity. From resource management and asteroid protection to archives of human knowledge, this book offers a comprehensive plan on how we should utilize the resources of space to earth’s advantage.
Prof. Yvonne Latty’s most recent book, In Conflict: Iraq War Veterans Speak Out on Duty, Loss and the Fight to Stay Alive (PoliPointPress), was released in May. Latty also authored We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans from World War II to the War in Iraq (Harper Collins/Amistad). Currently, Latty is a clinical professor at the Department of Journalism and previously she was an adjunct professor of journalism at Villanova University and a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News.
The third edition of Prof. Mitchell Stephens’ highly regarded History of News has been released from Oxford University Press.
Prof. Steven Johnson’s new book The Ghost Map garners praise: the Wall Street Journal called it “marvelous” and “unputdownable” and the Seattle Times called it a “masterpiece of historical writing.” Here’s Prof. Johnson’s announcement of the book, and a separate essay in the NY Times Sunday Book Review on Google’s increasing influence on ideas and their distribution and lifespan, “Own Your Own Words”.
Prof. Charles Seife, of the Department’s Science & Environmental Reporting Program, explains the un-explainable (to the average person at least) in his upcoming book Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From our Brains to Black Holes, available February 4, 2006. A brief (starred) review of the book is available from Publishers Weekly.
Distinguished Writer in Residence Prof. Paul Berman’s Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, was published this October.
For more published work, check out the Publishing Zone on the Department site.