Presented by the "Global Peace, Security, and Human Rights" Lecture SeriesWriting About Wrongs: Moral Clarity and Political Reality
3:00 P.M. / Sunday, December 8 / Free
UCSB Corwin Pavilion

Award-winning journalist, Philip Gourevitch, will discuss his experience as writer and reporter covering morally charged, and often violent, international political conflicts and their aftermaths. In particular, he will focus on questions of humanitarianism and its discontents -- and of the abiding tension between the appeal to conscience in situations of great human suffering and the great reluctance of the great powers to be moved to intervene. Generally, when a great power -- like America -- stands passively in the face of crimes against humanity, there is much protest, but then again, when America intervenes, its intervention rarely seems to conform comfortably to the desires of professional humanitarians. It is this tension between moral clarity and political reality that will be the subject of reflection in his talk.

Gourevitch has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since April, 1997. For "After the Genocide," one of a series of pieces on the Rwandan tragedy, he won a citation from the Overseas Press Club. He was also a finalist for the National Magazine Award in both 1996 and 1997.

Mr. Gourevitch's first book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda, was published in September, 1998, by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the George Polk Award for non-fiction, the Overseas Press Club Book Award, the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, PEN / Martha Albrand Award for first non-fiction.

His second book, A Cold Case, based on a story which first appeared in The New Yorker on February 14, 2000, was published by FSG in Summer of 2001.

Before coming to The New Yorker, Mr. Gourevitch was the New York Bureau Chief at The Forward from 1992 to 1993, and Cultural Editor from 1993 to 1995. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute. Gourevitch has also written for publications including Harper's, Granta, The New York Review of Books, Southwest Review, Story, and Zoetrope.

Mr. Gourevitch received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1986 and an M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1992. He lives in New York City.

This event is part of the "Global Peace, Security, and Human Rights" lecture series being sponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Global and International Studies Program, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. It is being put on in partnership with the Santa Barbara Committee on Foreign Relations, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, PAX 2100, International Studies Association at Santa Barbara City College, and the International Studies Program at Ventura College.

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