Connecting Students to the World: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
In professional life, mastery of interview skills is critical. In these excerpts from the Conversations with History archive, journalists, social scientists, and artists talk about how they use interviewing to do the job at hand.
Lowell Begmanis an award-winning reporter, producer, and journalism consultant who teaches in the Journalism School at UC Berkeley. Lowell Bergman was a founder of the Center of Investigative Journalism. The story of his fight to expose the tobacco industry and to protect his sources -- to keep his word to a tobacco whistler-blower -- is chronicled in the Michael Mann movie The Insider. |
Mark Danner is a staff writer for the New Yorker specializing in foreign affairs. He has worked on the staff of the New York Review of Books, as senior editor of Harper's Magazine, as foreign affairs editor of The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote and Beyond the Mountains: The Legacy of Duvalier. Danner is a MacArthur Fellow and a visiting professor in the School of Journalism and the Human Rights Center. |
James Fallows is the national correspondent of the Atlantic Monthly. He's the author of several books, including National Defense, More Like Us, Looking at the Sun, and most recently, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. |
Timothy Garton Ash is a writer and Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. He is the author of The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (1983), which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (1989), for which he was awarded the Prix Europeen de l'Essai; and We the People: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (1990; U.S. Edition: The Magic Lantern). |
Philip Gourevitch, staff writer at the New Yorker. His first book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, won numerous awards including the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Nonfiction. Mr. Gourevitch has written extensively from Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States for numerous publications, including Granta, Harpers, and the New York Review of Books. |
Interviewing for a Dramatic Role Shima Iwashita is an actress and a leading figure in Japanese cinema. She played both the female leading roles in Double Suicide. |
Josef Joffe is a German journalist and prominent international relations scholar. He is the publisher of the German periodical Die Zeit. Mr. Joffe has written numerous scholarly articles and chapters in books and is a regular contributor to journals like The National Interest and Foreign Affairs. He is author of The Limited Partnership: Europe, the United States, and the Burdens of Alliance |
For more than forty years as a writer, investigator, and psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton has used the skills of a researcher and the imagination of a healer of the mind to confront some of the most disturbing events of our times. He is the author of many important works including The Nazi Doctors, winner of the Los Angeles Times book prize; Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, winner of a National Book Award; Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Executioners Nor Victims; and Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. |
Interviewing as an Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also directs the Doctoral Program in Critical Studies of Medicine, Science, and the Body. Her many publications include Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, which received the Margaret Meade Award, and Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, which received several awards including the International Pitre Prize and the Wellcome Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She is currently writing a book entitled Who's the Killer: Violence and Democracy in the New South Africa. |
For over fifty years Robert Wise has made great movies. He won the Academy Award for West Side Story and for The Sound of Music. Working in all genres, he has helped audiences think about the human condition. Racism, capital punishment, power and purpose in the corporate boardroom, questions of war and peace, the dangers of nuclear and biological weapons -- all have been addressed at one time or another in his films, and often ahead of his time. |
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