2017 - Fall

Cataclysm: The Journalism of War, Terrorism, and Human Rights

Course Number: JOUR-GA 2081

Day & Time: Tuesday, 5:00pm-8:00pm

Location: 7th Floor Library

Instructor: Susie Linfield

This is a course about war and violence, ethics and human rights. We will look at some of the key political events of the 20th– and early 21st centuries, and try to understand how the world we live in came to be. And we’ll study how journalists wrote about those events, and were changed by them.

This class is predicated on two ideas: that historical knowledge is necessary for any journalist (and any citizen); and that journalists–far from simply writing the “first draft” of history–have, throughout the last century, created works of lasting literary, moral, intellectual, and historic resonance.