The Program in Journalism at Princeton University is pleased to announce five innovative and distinguished journalists chosen to serve as visiting professors in the 2023-24 academic year. These reporters and authors will each teach one intensive seminar within the Humanities Council, the academic home of the long-running Ferris Seminars, now entering their 66th year.
The visiting faculty will be welcomed by the program’s recurrent faculty: Joe Stephens, founding director of the undergraduate certificate program, Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence and former investigative reporter for The Washington Post; Deborah Amos, Ferris Professor of Journalism in Residence and former international correspondent for NPR News; Andrea Elliott, Ferris Professor of Journalism and staff writer for The New York Times; and John McPhee, Senior Fellow in Journalism and staff writer for The New Yorker.
“Next year’s visiting journalists rank among the world’s most inventive and admired,” Stephens said. “They continue a rich tradition of journalism excellence at Princeton, and we very much look forward to welcoming them to the University community.”
Journalism’s visiting professors in Fall 2023:
—Jane Ferguson is an international correspondent for PBS NewsHour and a contributor to The New Yorker who has reported from war zones across the globe. In her second stint as a Ferris Professor, she will teach “War Reporting: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” which will examine the challenges in witnessing and communicating complex global conflicts.
—Joshua Prager is a journalist and author known for writing about historical secrets and cultural touchstones. His latest book is “The Family Roe,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist about the Supreme Court’s most divisive case. In “The Literature of Fact: Writing about History,” he will teach students to find and record what is missing from the stories we tell ourselves.
—Keith Richburg is a member of The Washington Post Editorial Board, a Post Global Opinions columnist and the director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. In his second time in the program, Richburg with teach “Politics and the Media: Foreign Policy, Public Opinion and the Press,” about the current interplay of these forces.
The Spring 2024 visiting professors in the Program in Journalism:
—Rund Abdelfatah is the co-creator, host and senior producer of Throughline, NPR’s Peabody Award-winning history show that has over 2 million downloads per month. A Princeton alumna who took journalism courses as an undergraduate, she will teach a seminar on audio journalism with a focus on telling stories in experimental ways while maintaining the highest standards of journalistic integrity.
—Christiaan Triebert is a journalist with The New York Times’ Visual Investigations team and formerly a senior investigator and lead trainer at Bellingcat. His course on digital journalism will delve into the emerging field of online open source investigation, a new form of explanatory and accountability journalism and the latest method of news-gathering. Triebert has shared two Pulitzer Prizes.
The visiting professors’ seminars will complement those regularly offered by the program. In the fall, Stephens will teach “Investigative Journalism: In-depth Reporting,” while Amos will lead “International News: Migration Reporting,” which will include a fall-break reporting trip to Germany. In the spring, Stephens will teach his media course, “The Media in America: What to Read and Believe in the Digital Age,” and Elliott will offer “Creative Nonfiction: The Act of Immersion: Reporting Deeply on the Lives of Others.”
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 Ferris Seminars into a formal undergraduate certificate program.
