Nicholas Lemann | |
|---|---|
 Lemann at the 2006 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | Nicholas Berthelot Lemann |
| Occupation | Academic |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Metairie Park Country Day School |
| Alma mater | Harvard University (BA) |
Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is an American writer and academic, and is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at theColumbia University Graduate School of Journalism.[1] He has been a staff writer atThe New Yorker since 1999.[2] Lemann was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society in 2022.[3]
| External videos | |
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 "Nicholas Lemann: Growing Up Jewish in the American South",Big Think |
Nicholas Lemann was born, raised, and educated in aJewish family[4] inNew Orleans. He describes his family's faith as a "kind of super-Reform Judaism" where there were "nokosher laws, nobar mitzvahs, notallit, nokippot".[5]
He was educated atMetairie Park Country Day School,[6] a private school inNew Orleans, from which he graduated in 1972, followed byHarvard University, where he studied American history and literature, and was president ofThe Harvard Crimson, where he wrote theBrass Tacks column, and from which he graduatedmagna cum laude in 1976.[6]
Lemann began his journalism career as a 17-year-old writer for analternative weekly, theVieux Carre Courier, in his home city of New Orleans. In 1975, amid reports of mass murder in Cambodia by theKhmer Rouge, Lemann wrote, "I continue to support the Khmer Rouge in its principles and goals but I have to admit that I deplore the way they are going about it."[7] After graduation, he worked at theWashington Monthly, as an associate editor and then managing editor; atTexas Monthly, as an associate editor and then executive editor; atThe Washington Post, as a member of the national staff; atThe Atlantic Monthly, as national correspondent; and atThe New Yorker, as staff writer and then Washington correspondent.
Lemann won the 1980Raymond Clapper Memorial Award "...for a series of stories outlining the plight of a family on welfare."[8]
On September 1, 2003, Lemann became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.[9] 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 program since the 1930s, and launched initiatives in investigative reporting, digital journalism, executive leadership for news organizations, and other areas.[10] He stepped down as dean in 2013, following two five-year terms.[11]
In 2015, Lemann launchedColumbia Global Reports, a university-funded publishing imprint that produces four to six ambitious works of journalism and analysis a year, each on a different underreported story in the world.[12] From 2017 to early 2021, he was the director of Columbia World Projects.[13]
Lemann is the author or editor of several books, includingTransaction 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); andThe Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications asThe New York Times,The New York Review of Books,The New Republic, andSlate; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc.,Frontline, theDiscovery Channel, and theBBC; and lectured at many universities.
Lemann serves on the boards of directors of theAuthors Guild, theNational Academy of Sciences' Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and the Academy of Political Science, and is a member of theNew York Institute for the Humanities. He was named a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2010.[10]
Lemann has been married twice. His first wife wasDominique Alice Browning, who later became an editor in chief ofHouse & Garden. They married on May 20, 1983,[14] have two sons, Alexander and Theodore, and later divorced. His second wife isJudith Anne Shulevitz, a columnist forSlate,The New York Times Book Review, andThe New Republic. Married on November 7, 1999,[15] they have a son and a daughter.[16]
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The university-funded publisher aims to produce novella-length narratives, sprinkled with analysis, on underreported stories rooted in globalization...Unlike most traditional book publishers (but like high-end magazines), Columbia Global Reports fact checks, pays writers' expenses, and has a total production time, from signed contract to store shelves, that's measured in months, not years
