College of Liberal Arts & Sciences The University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication The University of Iowa

Visiting Professionals - Fall, 2009

Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor: Victor Navasky
October 10-16, 2009

Victor Navasky became editor of The Nation in 1978, then editorial director and publisher in 1995, and is now its publisher emeritus. He is also the George Delacorte Professor of Magazine Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he directs the Delacorte Center of Magazines and chairs the Columbia Journalism Review. 

Before coming to The Nation, Navasky was an editor at The New York Times Magazine and wrote a monthly column about the publishing business (“In Cold Print”) for the Times Book Review. He is the author of Kennedy Justice (Atheneum, 1977) and Naming Names (Viking, 1980), which won a National Book Award and has been republished by Farrar Straus and Giroux (2003) with a new afterword; and with Christopher Cerf, he is co-author of The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, a new version of which has been published in England under the title Wish I Hadn’t Said That! He was founding editor and publisher of Monocle, a “leisurely quarterly of political satire and social criticism” that appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With Richard R. Lingeman, Mr. Navasky is the co-author of “Starr’s Last Tape,” a one-act play which was performed at the Berkshire Theater Festival during the summer of 1999.

His latest sole-authored book is the memoir A Matter of Opinion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005; in paper, Picador USA, 2006), of which The New York Times said: “Anybody who has ever dreamed of starting a magazine, or worried that the country is losing the ability to speak seriously to itself, should read his new book …” The book has earned Navasky the 2005 George Polk Book Award and the 2006 Ann M. Sperber Prize.

Among his many other awards and prizes, Navasky was the 2001 recipient of the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association to “honor a major journalist contribution to our understanding of politics.”

Navasky has served as a Guggenheim Fellow (1975-76), a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1975-76), a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University (1994), and a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center (1995). He has served on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Committee to Protect Journalists, and as a vice president of P.E.N. He is a member of the Board of Governors of the New School for Social Research.

He has taught at numerous colleges and universities, including as Ferris Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton (1976-77) where he taught a seminar on “Politics and the Press,” and as Eugene Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change at Swarthmore College (1982). He continues to contribute articles and reviews to many magazines and journals of opinion. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School (1959) where he taught legal research, and Swarthmore College, 1954, where he was Phi Beta Kappa with High Honors in the Social Sciences. He and his wife, Anne, have three children and live in New York City.

Visiting Professionals:

Nancy Updike
September 27-30

Nancy Updike is an award-winning American public radio producer and writer. Her work has been featured on radio programs including This American Life, All Things Considered, and Fresh Air. Her writing has been published in The New York Times Magazine, LA Weekly, The Boston Globe, and Salon.com.

Charles J. Hanley
October 25-28

Charles Hanley has been a roving correspondent assigned to the Associated Press International Desk in New York for most of the past 25 years, reporting from more than 80 countries on stories ranging from wars and summit conferences to the plight of a threatened tribe in New Guinea. In recent years he has reported extensively from Afghanistan and Iraq on the crises and conflicts in those countries.

He joined the AP in 1968 in Albany, N.Y., where he later became a political correspondent and then bureau news editor. He moved to the AP Foreign Desk in 1976. He served as AP assistant and then deputy managing editor in 1987-92, after which he was named a special correspondent, a title awarded to only a handful of AP journalists.

His international reporting has won awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Associated Press Managing Editors association, Brown University’s Feinstein media awards program, and the Korn-Ferry awards program for reporting on the United Nations. He and his AP collaborators also won 11 major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism and a George Polk Award, for their reporting on the U.S. military’s killing of refugees at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in 1950.

Hanley is co-author of World War II: A 50th Anniversary History’ (Henry Holt); 20th Century America (Grolier Educational); FLASH! The Associated Press Covers the World (Abrams); and The Bridge at No Gun Ri, published in 2001 by Henry Holt.

He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 6, 1947, and was graduated from St. Bonaventure University with a B.A. in journalism. He served as a U.S. Army journalist in South Carolina and Vietnam in 1969-70. He and his wife, Pamela Hanlon, a public relations professional, reside in New York.

Christina Capecci
November 8-11

Christina Capecchi is a reporter and columnist for MinnPost.com, an online newspaper in Minneapolis.  She also covers breaking news as a Minnesota stringer for The New York Times.  She self syndicates the column "Twenty Something," which appears in 50 Catholic newspapers across the country. Christina earned a bachelor's degree in English and communications at Mount Mercy College, and a master's degree in journalism at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. Among her favorite stories: