Faculty Emeriti

Professor Nasar was the first James S. and John L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism. She co-directed the M.A. program in business journalism.

Professor Nasar is the author of the bestselling biography, "A Beautiful Mind," which has been published in 30 languages, including Farsi, Turkish, Russian and Hindi, and inspired the Academy Award-winning movie directed by Ron Howard (2001).

Trained as an economist, Professor Nasar was a New York Times economics correspondent (1991-1999), staff writer at Fortune (1983-1989) and columnist at U.S. News & World Report (1990). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Newsweek, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Fast Company, London Telegraph and numerous other publications. 

She lectured on topics ranging from globalization and economics to mental illness and mathematics. Professor Nasar co-edited "The Essential John Nash" (2001) and “Best American Science Writing of 2008” (2009), acted as creative consultant for the American Experience documentary, “A Brilliant Madness” (2001), and wrote the script for the 321 Fast Draw video, “The History of Economic Progress in Four Minutes” (2011).

She is the recipient of many honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), the Berlin Prize (2013), the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology (2011), the Spears Financial History Book of the Year Award (2011), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (1998) and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography (1998). She has held visiting fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation (2006-2007), the MacDowell Colony (2006), Yaddo (2005), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2002-2003, 1995-96); and Kings and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge University (2000). She has served as a judge for the National Book Award, Anthony Lucas Book Award, the Lynton History Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, Dow Jones Newswires, and SABEW and serves on the advisory board of TeenScreen.

Professor Nasar, who grew up in Germany and Turkey, received her B.A. in literature from Antioch College (1970) and her M.A. in economics from New York University (1976). She was awarded honorary doctorates from De Paul University (2005) and Niagara University (2011).

Steve Coll is an editor at the Economist, the author of nine books of nonfiction, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post. There he covered Wall Street, served as the paper’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and was the Post’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London. He served as managing editor of the Post between 1998 and 2004. The following year, he joined The New Yorker, where was a staff writer until 2023, when he joined the Economist as a senior editor. 

Coll is the author of “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” published in 2004, for which he received an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His 2008 book, “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” won the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His book “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power” won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Award as the best business book of 2012. His book "Directorate S," a follow-up to "Ghost Wars," received the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. 

His most recent book, published in February 2024, is “The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.” 

He has four children and is married to Eliza Griswold, the journalist and poet. He has a B.A. in English and history from Occidental College.

Samuel G. Freedman is an award-winning author, columnist, and professor. A former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University, he is the author of the nine acclaimed books, and is currently at work on his tenth, which will be about Hubert Humphrey, Civil Rights, and the 1948 Democratic convention.

Freedman’s previous books are Small Victories: The Real World of a Teacher, Her Students and Their High School (1990); Upon This Rock: The Miracles of a Black Church (1993); The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (1996); Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (2000); Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life (2005); and Letters To A Young Journalist (2006); and Breaking The Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Game and Changed the Course of Civil Rights (2013).

With his colleague Kerry Donahue, Freedman co-produced a radio documentary and authored a companion book, both entitled Dying Words: The AIDS Reporting of Jeff Schmalz and How it Transformed The New York Times. The documentary and book were released in conjunction with World AIDS Day on December 1, 2015, and since then the documentary has been broadcast on more than 500 NPR member stations. Most recently, Freedman wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: The Journey From Stage to Screen, the companion book to the film adaptation of August Wilson’s classic play.

Small Victories was a finalist for the 1990 National Book Award and The Inheritance was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Upon This Rock won the 1993 Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Four of Freedman’s books have been listed among The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year.
 
Jew vs. Jew won the National Jewish Book Award for Non-Fiction in 2001 and made the Publishers Weekly Religion Best-Sellers list. As a result of the book, Freedman was named one of the “Forward Fifty” most important American Jews in the year 2000 by the weekly Jewish newspaper The Forward.

Freedman was a staff reporter for The New York Times from 1981 through 1987. From 2004 through 2008, he wrote the paper’s “On Education” column, winning first prize in the Education Writers Association’s annual competition in 2005. From 2006 through 2016, Freedman wrote the “On Religion” column, receiving the Goldziher Prize for Journalists in 2017 for a series of columns about Muslim-Americans that had been published over the preceding six years.

Freedman has contributed to numerous other publications and websites, including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Daily Beast, New York, Rolling Stone, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Salon, Slate, Chicago Sun-Times, Tablet, The Forward, Ha’aretz, The Undefeated, The Root, and BeliefNet.

Freedman was named the nation's outstanding journalism educator in 1997 by the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2012, he received Columbia University’s coveted Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. Freedman’s class in book-writing has developed more than 100 authors, editors, and agents, and it has been featured in Publishers Weekly and the Christian Science Monitor. He is a board member of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Awards and member of the Journalism Advisory Council of Religion News Service. 

Freedman holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nicholas Lemann was born, raised and educated in New Orleans. He began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for an alternative weekly newspaper there, the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1976, where he concentrated in American history and literature and was president of the Harvard Crimson. After graduation, he worked at the Washington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; at Texas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; at The Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; at The Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and at The New Yorker, as a staff writer and then Washington correspondent.

In September 2003, he became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, at the end of a process of re-examination of the school's mission conducted by a national task force convened by the university's president, Lee C. Bollinger. During Lemann's time as dean, the Journalism School launched and completed its first capital fundraising campaign, added 20 members to its full-time faculty, built a student center, started its first new professional degree programs since the 1930s, and launched significant new initiatives in investigative reporting, digital journalism, executive leadership for news organizations, and other areas. He stepped down as dean in 2013, following two five-year terms. Now Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus, he also directs Columbia Global Reports, a book publishing venture. From 2017 to 2021, he was the founding director of Columbia World Projects, a new institution that implements academic research outside the university.

Lemann continues to contribute to The New Yorker as a staff writer. His books include Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019); Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999), which helped lead to a major reform of the SAT; The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., "FRONTLINE," the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities.

Lemann currently serves on the boards of the Authors Guild, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2019.

Melvin Mencher, professor emeritus, taught at the Graduate School of Journalism from 1962 to 1990 after working for the United Press and newspapers in New Mexico and California. He has covered Central America as a special correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. Mencher has also taught at the University of Kansas and Humboldt State University. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and is the author of "News Reporting and Writing," now in its 12th edition.

LynNell Hancock is a reporter and writer specializing in education and child and family policy issues, who has taught journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism since 1993. She is the director of the Spencer Fellowship for Education Journalism, a program that supports the work of mid-career journalists to study at Columbia and produce significant works of journalism on education topics.

In addition to contributing to Newsweek, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation and The New York Times, she served on staff of The Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and Newsweek where she covered national and local education issues. She has served on the National Advisory Board of Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family Policy and Columbia University’s Institute for Child and Family Policy.

Hancock is the author of "Hands to Work: The Stories of Three Families Racing the Welfare Clock" (2002) and contributed to "America’s Mayor" (2005) and "The Public Assault on America’s Children: Poverty, Violence and Juvenile Injustice" (2000).

Hancock holds an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Literature and an M.S. in Journalism, both from Columbia.

Listen to Prof. Hancock on BlogTalkRadio.

Dinges was in charge of the school’s radio curriculum, which he revamped to emphasize public radio journalism. He received a BA from Loras College and an MA in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. Dinges began his career as a reporter and copy editor for The Des Moines Register & Tribune. He was a freelance correspondent in Latin America for many years, during the period of military governments and civil wars in South and Central America, writing for Time, The Washington Post, ABC Radio, The Miami Herald and other news organizations.

On his return to the United States, he worked as assistant editor on the foreign desk at The Washington Post. He joined National Public Radio as it was building up its foreign coverage, serving as deputy foreign editor and managing editor for news.

He is the author of "The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents" (The New Press 2004). His other books include "Assassination on Embassy Row" (1980), "Our Man in Panama: The Shrewd Rise and Brutal Fall of Manuel Noriega" (1990), "Sound Reporting: The National Public Radio Guide to Radio Journalism and Production" (as co-editor and co-author) (1992), and "Independence and Integrity: A Guidebook for Public Radio Journalism" (co-editor) (1995).

His awards include the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for excellence in Latin American reporting, the Latin American Studies Media Award, and two Alfred I. du Pont-Columbia University Awards (as NPR Managing Editor).

Listen to Prof. Dinges on BlogTalkRadio.

James B. Stewart was the Bloomberg professor of business journalism. He taught in the business section of the M.A. program. 

He is the author of eleven books, including the national best-seller, “DisneyWar,” an account of Michael Eisner's tumultuous reign at America's best known entertainment company. He is also the author of national bestsellers “Den of Thieves,” about Wall Street in the 80s, “Blind Eye”, an investigation of the medical profession, and “Blood Sport”, about the Clinton White House. “Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction,” was inspired by his classes at Columbia. “Heart of a Soldier,” named the best non-fiction book of 2002 by Time magazine, recounts the remarkable life of Rick Rescorla, a victim in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His most also authored “Tangled Web.”

He wrote for the New York Times and contributed regularly to The New Yorker. He was formerly "Page One" Editor of The Wall Street Journal.

Stewart is the recipient of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Wall Street Journal articles on the 1987 stock market crash and the insider trading scandal. He is also the winner of the George Polk award and two Gerald Loeb awards. “Blind Eye” was the winner of the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award given annually by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2005, “DisneyWar” was named a finalist for the first annual Financial Times/Goldman Sachs business book of the year award.

Stewart is a graduate of Harvard Law School and DePauw University. He was born and attended public schools in Quincy, Illinois.

Betsy West is a video journalist and filmmaker. She directed RBG (CNNFilms, Magnolia, Participant) along with CJS alum Julie Cohen ‘89. RBG, a theatrical documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

West was executive producer of the MAKERS documentary and digital project (AOL & PBS, 2012); the feature documentary The Lavender Scare (2017), and the short doc 4%: Film’s Gender Problem (Epix 2016.)  Along with her husband, filmmaker Oren Jacoby, she is a principal at Storyville Films where she co-produced Constantine’s Sword (First Run Features, 2007.)

West joined the Columbia faculty in 2009 after working three decades in network news. As a producer and executive at ABC News, she received 21 Emmy Awards and two duPont-Columbia Awards for her work on “Nightline” and “PrimeTimeLive” and the documentary program ”Turning Point,” where she served as executive producer from 1994-1998. As senior vice president at CBS News from 1998-2005, she oversaw “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours,” and was executive in charge of the CBS documentary 9/11, winner of the Primetime Emmy Award in 2002.

At Columbia, she taught classes in reporting, video production and documentary. She co-curated and moderated the FilmFridays screening series that brought first-run documentaries and their directors to the Journalism School.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, West holds a Master’s in Communications from Syracuse University. She served two terms on the Corporation of Brown University, and sat on Board of Directors of The New 42nd Street. 

Dale Maharidge has been teaching at the journalism school since 2001; he first taught here in the early 1990s. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University for ten years and before that he spent fifteen years as a newspaperman, writing for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Sacramento Bee, and others. He’s written for Rolling Stone, George Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, The New York Times op-ed page, Smithsonian, Slate, The Guardian, among others.

Most Many of his books are illustrated with the work of photographer Michael Williamson. The first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), later inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs; it was reissued in 1996 with an introduction by Springsteen. His second book, And Their Children After Them (1989), won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990. Other books include Yosemite: A Landscape of Life (1990); The Last Great American Hobo (1993); The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism & the Nation's Future (1996, 1999); Homeland (2004); Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town (2005); Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression (2011); and Leapers, (2012); His most recent book is Bringing Mulligan Home: The Other Side of the Good War, (2013); a March 2013 release by PublicAffairs. Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance (with Jessica Bruder, 2020); Fucked at Birth: Recalibrating the American Dream for the 2020s (2021); and a forthcoming novel, Burn Coast. A podcast, “The Dead Drink First,” (2019) reached number one in all categories on Audible for several weeks.

Maharidge attended Cleveland State University. He was a 1988 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Maharidge has held residencies Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies.

Ari L. Goldman taught at Columbia as a professor of journalism for more than 30 years until his retirement in 2024. 

When he first came to Columbia to teach in 1993, Professor Goldman created the school’s Covering Religion seminar, which later gained the financial support of the Scripps Howard Fund. The fund enabled Professor Goldman to take students in the Covering Religion seminar on study-tours abroad during spring break. Over 20 years of travel, his class visited India, Russia, Ukraine, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Italy, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories. To learn more about these trips, visit the class blog. 

Ari Goldman was educated at Yeshiva University, Harvard and Columbia. He is a 1973 graduate of the Journalism School and spent 20 years at The New York Times, most of it as a religion writer, before returning to Columbia to teach. Although he spent most of his time in the classroom, he also spent a year as Dean of Students and another year as acting Academic Dean.

Professor Goldman has been a Visiting Fulbright Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem; a Skirball Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies in England, and a scholar-in-residence at Yeshiva’s Stern College for Women.

He is the author of four books including the best-selling memoir, “The Search for God at Harvard.” He has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Religion News Association and with an Alumni Award from Columbia Journalism.

In addition to his teaching at the university level, Goldman is on the faculty of the School of The New York Times where his course, “Writing the Big City: Covering New York,” is one of the most popular offerings. It is open to high school students of all ages.

He occasionally contributes articles, obituaries and reviews to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, The New York Jewish Week, the Forward, Tradition and the Jesuit magazine America.

See Professor Goldman being interviewed on the CNN program “Amanpour” with his Covering Religion colleague Professor Gregory Khalil.

See Professors Goldman and Khalil interviewed on CBS News.

Here are recent articles by Professor Goldman from The New York Times.

Web feature: A Day in the Life: Four Hours With Ari Goldman

Ann Cooper is an award-winning journalist and foreign correspondent with more than 25 years of radio and print reporting experience. She also worked eight years as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom advocacy group, prior to joining the Columbia faculty.

Cooper’s voice was well known to National Public Radio listeners as NPR’s first Moscow bureau chief, covering the tumultuous events of the final five years of Soviet communism. She co-edited a book, “Russia at the Barricades,” about a failed 1991 coup attempt, and she has continued to write about the glasnost era, the subsequent decline of press freedom in Russia, and Russia’s global media strategy.

After Moscow, Cooper worked as NPR's bureau chief in Johannesburg. Her coverage of South Africa’s first all-race elections in 1994 helped NPR win a duPont-Columbia silver baton for excellence in broadcast journalism. 

Cooper has also reported for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Capitol Hill News Service, Congressional Quarterly, the Baltimore Sun, and National Journal magazine. In 1996, she was the Edward R. Murrow fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2003 she was the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism at State University of New York in New Paltz.

Cooper served as president of the Correspondents Fund and is a member of CPJ’s Leadership Council and of the Council on Foreign Relations. At Columbia, she was the Journalism School’s Broadcast Director 2006-2012 and International Director 2015-2018. She served on Columbia's Committee on Global Thought and as a member of the Harriman Institute faculty at Columbia. Cooper has also been a juror for the Pulitzer, Overseas Press Club and duPont-Columbia awards, and she chaired the duPont jury 2007-2010.

Iowa State University, where Cooper majored in journalism, has honored her with its James W. Schwartz award for service to journalism and its Alumni Merit Award, given "for outstanding contributions to human welfare that transcend purely professional accomplishments and bring honor to the university."

She has been to nearly 80 countries – some as a journalist, others as a press-freedom advocate or a team leader for Habitat for Humanity global volunteer programs. She has been a U.S. State Department speaker on press freedom and journalism ethics in Turkey, Russia and Germany. 

Cooper was a Spring 2020 fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.