Campus News

Acclaimed Journalists and Soviet Experts to visit UK

LEXINGTON, Ky. (March 11, 2010) - The American Studies program in the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Journalism and Telecommunications in the UK College of Communications and Information Studies welcome former New York Times Moscow Bureau Chief Christopher Wren and Time Magazine Moscow correspondent Stephen Handelman for several classroom presentations and lectures March 25 and 26. The pair will give a public lecture on "The End of the Cold War" at 4 p.m. Thursday, March 25, on the 18th floor of the Patterson Office Tower.

"Wren and Handelman are renowned journalists with broad interdisciplinary interests," said Alan Nadel, professor in the American Studies program in the College of Arts and Sciences. "The university community will benefit from hearing these two prominent journalists’ unique perspectives on Communism, the Soviet Union, international crime, and the recording of history."

Wren reported and edited for The New York Times for nearly 29 years. He headed the paper's news bureaus in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa and Johannesburg, and later covered the United Nations. He has reported from throughout the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, China, Africa, South America and Canada. He also worked as an editor at Look and Newsweek and the International Herald Tribune in Paris.

After retiring from The Times, Wren lived in St. Petersburg, Russia for six months, training Russian journalists and advising independent newspapers for the International Center for Journalists. He also has trained publishers and editors in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and ran Russian-language workshops for journalists in 10 cities and towns across Kazakhstan for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He has written five books and co-authored three others.

Stephen Handelman is director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice (CMCJ) at John Jay College at City University of New York and executive editor of The Crime Report, the nation's first online criminal justice news and resource site. A prize-winning former columnist, senior writer and foreign correspondent for Time magazine and The Toronto Star, his articles and op-eds have appeared in newspapers, magazines and academic journals around the world, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent (UK) and Foreign Affairs. In 1995, he wrote "Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya" (Yale University Press), the first account of the rise of organized crime in post-Soviet Russia, which was on The New York Times Notable Books of the Year list. In a follow-up book, Handelman unraveled the Soviet bio-weapons program in "Bio-hazard" (Random House, 1999) co-authored with Ken Alibek, head of the long-secret program.

He has taught at Rutgers University, Pace University and the New School (specializing in international terrorism, transnational crime and media issues), and lectured at more than 30 universities around the U.S. He currently serves as consulting managing editor for Americas Quarterly, a journal published by The Americas Society in New York.  

 

In addition to their public lecture, Wren and Handleman will speak to graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences and to undergraduate journalism students, including those in a class on international reporting. They will also meet with faculty and representatives of the local media.