Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post editor and foreign correspondent Glenn Frankel has been named director of the School of Journalism at The University of Texas at Austin.
He will replace Tracy Dahlby, the Frank A. Bennack, Jr. Chair in Journalism, who has been director since July 2008. Frankel will start on Aug. 1, 2010, and will hold the G. B. Dealey Professorship in Journalism.
Frankel is the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Journalism in the Department of Communication at Stanford University where he teaches news reporting and writing, magazine writing and human rights journalism. He also is helping the department develop its multimedia journalism curriculum and is the journalism adviser on the board of the Stanford Daily.
“Glenn’s credibility as a journalist, his energy and resolve, and his thoughtful and humane manner combine to make him the ideal person to lead the School of Journalism at this point in the school’s history,” said Roderick P. Hart, dean of the College of Communication. “Under his guidance, our students and faculty will receive the support needed to examine journalistic practices in an era of unprecedented technological change. We are also pleased that Glenn will be joining us as we get ready to occupy the Belo Center for New Media just two short years from now.”
Frankel spent 27 years at the Washington Post as a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent, as well as editor of the Washington Post Magazine, which earned Robert F. Kennedy and Sigma Delta Chi prizes for magazine writing under his leadership.
He was bureau chief for the Washington Post in Jerusalem, London and Southern Africa covering the anti-apartheid struggle, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political demise of Margaret Thatcher, the transformation of the European Union and the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, among other world events. It was during his three-year stay in Israel that he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for “sensitive and balanced reporting” of Israel and the first Palestinian intifada. As deputy national news editor he oversaw coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson trial.
Frankel is the author of “Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel,” which won the National Jewish Book Award, and “Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa.” He is working on a book about the true origins of the Texas legend that became the basis for John Ford’s classic western “The Searchers.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in American History from Columbia University. He has been a Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford and an Alicia Patterson Fellow.
“At this exciting and turbulent time in the history of American journalism, there’s no better place to make a contribution than a great public institution like The University of Texas at Austin,” Frankel said. “It’s our students who are leading the process of sustaining and reinventing this critical part of our society, and it’s our task to help equip them with the values and the tools to do so.”
