The Program in Journalism at Princeton University will welcome three distinguished journalists as visiting professors in the 2024-25 academic year. These innovative writers and reporters will each teach an intensive course within the Humanities Council, the academic home of the long-running Ferris and McGraw seminars.
The program’s popular classes draw on the expertise of leading journalists as faculty who guide students as they learn to tell stories of impact, explore the ethics of journalism, and navigate the changing media landscape. Undergraduate students can now pursue a minor in journalism.
“We are honored to welcome to campus such a gifted group of diggers and storytellers,” said Joe Stephens, director of the Program in Journalism and a Ferris Professor in Residence. “They are among the best of the best, and we look forward to their contributions to a rich tradition of journalism excellence at the University.”
Ron Allen is a national and international news correspondent who has traveled the world uncovering stories of interest, most recently on the platforms of NBC News. Over decades, he has covered American politics, conflicts overseas, and breaking news events. His work, along with colleagues, has earned many of journalism’s most distinguished honors including multiple Emmy, Peabody, and du-Pont awards. In the fall, he will teach “The Challenges Covering an Increasingly Diverse Multicultural Nation,” which will examine why and how the media struggles to cover the issues and concerns of significant portions of the population in the United States.
May Jeong is a staff writer for Vanity Fair. She is the author of the forthcoming narrative nonfiction book “THE LIFE: Sex, Work, and Love in America,” which examines the ways sex work is criminalized within the American legal system. It was awarded a 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Her reporting from Afghanistan, where she lived from 2013 to 2017, received numerous awards, including the South Asian Journalist Association’s Daniel Pearl Award and the Bayeux Calvados Normandy Award for War Correspondents. Her fall undergraduate course, “The Media and Social Issues: Reporting from the Margins,” will explore the fundamental tenets of journalistic objectivity.
Amy Ellis Nutt is a former science writer for The Washington Post, where she covered neuroscience and mental health. She is a New York Times bestselling author. Her books include “Shadows Bright as Glass,” “The Teenage Brain,” which she co-authored, and “Becoming Nicole.” Nutt won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2011 for her reporting at the Newark-based Star-Ledger about the 2009 wreck of the Lady Mary fishing vessel. During her second appointment as a Visiting Ferris Professor, she will teach a spring 2025 seminar on the art and the craft of narrative nonfiction writing. In the course, students will learn storytelling techniques, from imagery and symbolism to structure and style.
Next year’s visitors will be greeted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, translator and poet Eliza Griswold. She will join the University as the Program in Journalism’s new director effective August 1.
Griswold has extensively covered religion, politics, and the environment as a contributing writer for The New Yorker for more than two decades. An alumna of Princeton, Griswold previously taught in the program as a Ferris Visiting Professor in 2014-15. In the fall, she will teach “The Media in America: Witnessing History,” where students will be introduced to the challenges facing democracy in the 2024 election year.
Griswold succeeds Stephens, who will continue at Princeton as a Ferris Professor in 2024-25, teaching the program’s “Investigative Journalism: In-depth Reporting” course in the fall. Deborah Amos, an award-winning international correspondent for NPR, will also teach a fall course, “International News: Migration Reporting.”
Princeton’s journalism courses were inaugurated in 1957 by a bequest from former New York Herald journalist Edwin F. Ferris. They have since become some of the nation’s most respected journalism seminars—as well as some of the University’s most highly rated classes. In 2018 the faculty voted unanimously to approve transforming the seminars into a formal academic program.
For a list of journalism courses offered in Fall 2024, please visit the Program in Journalism website.
