Faculty & Staff
Visiting Faculty
Every year, the Yale Journalism Initiative will bring to campus as visiting professors two highly regarded working journalists, one in the fall and one in the spring. The journalists will be selected for their wide-ranging professional experience, their reputations in the field, and their demonstrated eagerness to teach students and serve as mentors. Each semester, the Visiting Journalist will teach a section of English 467, Journalism.
Visiting Journalist for Fall 2007:
Steven Brill
Steven Brill, a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, is the author of the bestselling The Teamsters. He founded The American Lawyer magazine in 1979, which expanded into a chain of legal publications. In 1991 he founded cable's Court TV. After selling his interests in those businesses in 1997, he founded Brill's Content, a magazine about the media, which closed in 2001. After September 11, 2001, Brill became a columnist for Newsweek and an analyst for NBC on issues related to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. For more information on Steven Brill, see the English Department Web site.
Visiting Journalist for Spring 2008:
Jill Abramson
Jill Abramson was appointed managing editor of The New York Times in August 2003 after having been Washington bureau chief since December 2000. Abramson worked at The Wall Street Journal from 1988 to 1997. At The Wall Street Journal she served as the deputy bureau chief in its Washington D.C. bureau and as an investigative reporter covering money and politics. From 1986 to 1988 she was editor in chief of Legal Times, a weekly newspaper in Washington. During 2000-2001 fall term she was a Ferris professor at Princeton University, teaching an undergraduate seminar on politics and journalism. Abramson is the co-author of two books: Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, which was a finalist in the nonfiction category for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Where They Are Now: The Story of the Women of Harvard Law, 1974. In 1992, she won the National Press Club's national correspondence award, the group's top prize for political reporting, for a series of articles about the role of money in the 1992 elections. Abramson received her B.A. degree in history and literature, graduating magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1976.
Other Faculty Teaching Relevant Courses:
Anne Fadiman
Anne Fadiman is an essayist and reporter. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, her account of the crosscultural conflicts between a Hmong family and the American medical system, won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, is a book about books (buying them, writing in their margins, and arguing with her husband on how to shelve them). Her essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications. She is the only writer to have won National Magazine Awards for both reporting (on elderly suicide) and essays (on the multiple and often contradictory meanings of the American flag). Fadiman has also edited a literary quarterly, The American Scholar, and two essay anthologies. As Francis Writer-in-Residence, she teaches nonfiction writing and serves as a mentor to students who are considering careers in writing or editing. For more information on Anne Fadiman, see the English Department Web site.
Fred Strebeigh
Fred Strebeigh has written for publications including American Heritage, Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, E: The Environmental Magazine, Legal Affairs, New Republic, Reader's Digest, Russian Life, Sierra, Smithsonian, and the New York Times Magazine. Topics on which he has published include the history and origins of nature writing, the arts and crafts movement in America, the role of the bicycle as a cultural force in China, educational exchange between China and the United States, the creation of a dictionary of American dialects, pressures on the Antarctic treaty system, natural and social conditions in the Falkland Islands, the race to create radar during World War II, traces of early man in southern Africa, the rise of feminist law, saving whales from fishing nets off the coast of Newfoundland, the impact of environmental issues on the presidential election in 2004, and defending the world's largest system of scientific nature reserves in Russia. For W. W. Norton he is now completing a book, Equality Time: A History of Young Women Lawyers Who Tackled Old Male Law, which began with an article he wrote for the New York Times Magazine. In a national student writing competition run since 1997 by the Atlantic Monthly, work written for Fred Strebeigh's upper-level courses has received a fifth of all awards and a quarter of all prizes in nonfiction (including half of the nonfiction awards announced in the May 2005 Atlantic). His teaching in 2004 received Yale's DeVane medal, presented each year by Phi Beta Kappa to one member of the university's active faculty. For more information on Fred Strebeigh, see the English Department Web site.
Staff
Mark Oppenheimer
Mark Oppenheimer, a freelance journalist and former newspaper editor, is the coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative. Oppenheimer received his B.A. in history from Yale in 1996 and received his Ph.D. in religious studies, also from Yale, in 2003. He is the author of two books: Knocking on Heaven's Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America. In 2003, he was the first Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes at Stanford University; he has also taught at Wesleyan University and Hartford Seminary, and in Fall 2007 he is teaching Religion and Journalism at New York University. In 2000 and 2001, Oppenheimer was religion writer for the Hartford Courant, and from 2004 to 2006 Oppenheimer was the editor of the New Haven Advocate, an alternative weekly paper. A frequent speaker at universities, synagogues, and churches throughout the country, Mark's freelance writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, Slate, Details, Salon, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. He is currently a senior book critic for The Forward. He, his wife, and his daughter live in New Haven, Connecticut, with their dog, J.J., and their two cats, Fat Cat and Other Cat.
