Spring Symposium 2006

January 25, 2006

“The Working Poor: Invisible in America”
Dr. David Shipler
Woodrow Wilson Fellow

7:00 p.m. in Clarke Chapel
(book signing to follow)

Dr. David K. Shipler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. Dr. Shipler grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1964. He also holds honorary degrees (Doctor of Letters) from Middlebury College and Glassboro State College (N.J.) and a Masters of Arts degree from Dartmouth College. He has taught at Princeton and American University. He served in the U.S. Navy in 1964-66 as an officer on a destroyer. He joined The New York Times as a news clerk in 1966 and was promoted to city staff reporter in 1968, covering housing, poverty, and politics. He has won awards from the American Political Science Association, the New York Newspaper Guild, and elsewhere. From 1973-75 he served as a New York Times correspondent in Saigon, covering South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. He reported also from Burma. He then spent a semester in 1975 at the Russian Institute of Columbia University studying Russian language and Soviet politics, economics and history to prepare for assignment in Moscow, and was a correspondent in the Moscow Bureau for four years, 1975-79, serving as Moscow Bureau Chief from 1977 to 1979. From 1979 to 1984, he served as Bureau Chief of The New York Times in Jerusalem, and was co-recipient (with Thomas Friedman) of the 1983 George Polk Award for coverage of the Lebanon War. He served as Chief Diplomatic Correspondent in the Washington Bureau of The New York Times until 1988. He is married with three children and currently resides in Maryland.

Dr. Shipler wrote the best-selling book Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams, published in 1983, updated in 1989. Widely acclaimed by critics, it won the Overseas Press Club Award in 1983 as the best book that year on foreign affairs. He then spent a year, 1984-85, as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington to write Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, which explores the mutual perceptions and relationships between Arabs and Jews in Israel and the West Bank. This book won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. He was also executive producer, writer and narrator of a two-hour PBS documentary on Arab and Jew, which won a 1990 Dupont-Columbia award for broadcast journalism. From 1988 to 1990, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writing on transitions to democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe for The New Yorker and other publications. In the fall of 1997 he published A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, and was one of three authors invited by President Clinton to participate in his first town meeting on race in Akron. His most recent book is The Working Poor: Invisible in America, on which he will speak at Lycoming College.

Other Related Events:

Fireside chat in Snowden Library - Tuesday, January 24th, 7:00 pm

Lunch with students in the Jonas Room - Thursday, January 26th, 11:45 am

Coffee Chat at JV Brown Library - Friday, January 27th, 10:30 am

Dr. Shipler will also be attending many classes during his week-long visit.

David Shipler's books can be purchased at the Campus Bookstore prior to his Public Lecture Wednesday night. Any books remaining will be on sale at the event as well.
He will have a book-signing directly after his presentation in Clarke Chapel.

Contact: Dr. Betty McCall, Lycoming College Sociology Department