LECTURES, 2008-09

Click here to see a complete list of 2008-09 lectures

Monday, October 6, 2008, 5:00pm
Love Auditorium, Levine Science Research Center (LSRC), West Campus
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Freeing an Empire’s Slaves

ADAM HOCHSCHILD
Lecturer, Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
Author of King Leopold’s Ghost & Bury the Chains

About the Speaker: Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. His 1997 collection, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. King Leopold’s Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award. It also won a J. Anthony Lukas award and Britain’s Duff Cooper Prize. His books have been translated into thirteen languages and four of them have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award. His last two books have also each won Canada’s Lionel Gelber Prize and the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards. In 2005, he received a Lannan Literary Award for the body of his work.

Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and many other newspapers and magazines. His articles have won prizes from the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists and elsewhere. He was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine and has been a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

Hochschild teaches narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has been a Fulbright Lecturer in India, and has given writing workshops for working journalists in the United States, Britain, India, Zambia and South Africa.

Part of “In the Name of Humanity: Atlantic Slavery, Leopold’s Congo, & the Legacy of Early Human Rights Pioneers,” an event series inaugurating the affiliation of the FHI and the Duke Human Rights Center (DHRC). Other events in the series include a screening of the documentary film King Leopold’s Ghost with Hochschild and Director Pippa Scott, and a conversation on George Washington Williams: The Case of a Neglected American Hero with John Hope Franklin and Lea Wernick Fridman.

Presented by the FHI and DHRC in conjunction with the Office of the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke Center for International Studies, Archive for Human Rights, and Film/Video/Digital Program.