Shadid to deliver annual Morris lecture

Anthony Shadid, Islamic affairs correspondent for The Washington Post, has been named the 23rd Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial lecturer at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Shadid, who is based in the Middle East, will deliver the lecture on March 11 in the Knight Center at the Walter Lippmann House.

Prior to joining the Post, Shadid worked for the Boston Globe covering diplomacy and the U.S. State Department. Since Sept. 11, 2001, his assignments have taken

him to Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Europe, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Israel and the Palestinian territories. In March 2002, while reporting from Ramallah near the headquarters of Palestinian President Yassar Arafat, Shadid was shot in the back of his right shoulder.

Before joining the Globe, he was the news editor of the Los Angeles bureau of the Associated Press. Shadid was a Middle East correspondent for the AP in Cairo from 1995 to 1999. The work ranged from day-to-day reporting on strife in the West Bank to interviews with the young fighters of the Taliban on the front in Afghanistan. From 1993 to 1994, Shadid worked as an editor on the AP International Desk in New York.

Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent, speaks and reads Arabic. This offers him insights not often available to most Western journalists working in the Middle East. A native of Oklahoma City, he studied Arabic at the University of Wisconsin and as a recipient of a fellowship at the American University in Cairo in 1991-92. He gained additional understanding of the region through graduate work at Columbia University in New York in 1993-94.

Last year, Shadid received the George Polk Award for foreign reporting for a series of dispatches from the Middle East. In 1997 Shadid was honored the Bob Considine Award – a citation by the Overseas Press Club in the area of best newspaper or wire service interpretation of foreign affairs – for his work on a special report: “Islam’s Challenge.” The four-part series, published by the AP in December 1996, was the product of nine months of research and dozens of conversations with religious sheikhs, students, activists and politicians. The series formed the basis of his book, “Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam,” published by Westview Press in December 2000 and reissued in paperback in April 2002.

The Joe Alex Morris Jr. Memorial Lecture honors the foreign correspondent of the Los Angeles Times who was killed in February 1979 while covering the Iranian Revolution in Tehran. The lectureship was created in 1981 by family, Harvard classmates, and friends and is awarded annually by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

The Nieman Foundation administers the nation’s oldest midcareer fellowship program for journalists. Each year 12 American and 12 international journalists come to Harvard for a year of academic study. Since 1938, more than 1,000 American and international journalists have studied at Harvard as part of the fellowship program.