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Pulitzer Prize winners and best-selling authors are among the three journalists who will come to Bloomington as guests of the School of Journalism Speaker Series this spring.

Author Sheryl WuDunn, The New York Times London bureau chief John F. Burns and author Ken Auletta will give free lectures open to the public in March and April. Here’s the spring line-up:

Sheryl WuDunn

7 p.m. March 8
Alumni Hall, Indiana Memorial Union

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Sheryl WuDunn

Sheryl WuDunn blends her knowledge of finance and her experiences as a Pulitzer Prize-winning international correspondent to guide her current efforts to call attention the plight of women in developing countries.

WuDunn and her husband, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, are authors of a new book, Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which exposes feudal attitudes about women ranging from sexual exploitation to quiet negligence. Many of these stories have gone untold, the authors say, even while the world’s attention has been turned to other types of inequity. Further, the authors say changing the treatment of women “can be a successful poverty-fighting strategy anywhere in the world.”

The couple has collaborated before. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. They are the first couple to win a Pulitzer, and WuDunn is the first female Asian-American winner.

WuDunn witnessed many of the conditions she describes in the book while reporting on the tough regimes of Myanmar and North Korea for The New York Times. She covered China and worked in the Tokyo bureau on economic and financial issues.

Putting her Harvard MBA to further use, she shifted into working in strategic planning for the newspaper, helping develop business and marketing opportunities. WuDunn recently worked for Goldman Sachs as an adviser, guiding investors through the economic meltdown of 2008.

See a special presentation based on Half  the Sky:
In celebration of International Women’s Day, theaters around the nation are presenting Half the Sky, a one-night event featuring panel discussions, a documentary and musical performances inspired by the book by WuDunn and Kristof. Locally, Showplace 11 will air the program at 7:30 p.m. March 4. For more details, visit the Kerasotes Theatres Web site.

John F. Burns

7 p.m. March 29
Buskirk-Chumley Theater
114 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington

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John F. Burns

New York Times London Bureau Chief John F. Burns has spent more than 30 years as an international correspondent for the newspaper, covering embattled regions such as South Africa during apartheid, China during the Cultural Revolution, the siege of Sarajevo, and war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Along the way, Burns picked up two Pulitzer Prizes, the first in 1993 for his coverage of the siege and destruction of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, and the second in 1997 for his coverage of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. He twice has won the George Polk Award for foreign reporting.

Burns’ latest assignment caps recent years on the ground reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq. His earlier experience in Afghanistan was an asset after 9/11, when Burns was sent to the region to cover U.S. actions there. Later, he went to Iraq to cover the last six months of Saddam Hussein’s regime, going into hiding at one point to evade capture by Hussein’s secret police. After American troops captured Baghdad, he served as bureau chief there for the newspaper, working with 100 or so other journalists in a secure compound in Baghdad.

Based in London since 2007, Burns continues to report on U.S. wars and issues in those two countries, including regular writing and analysis for the Times’ At War blog. He also appears on news programs such as the PBS NewsHour, Charlie Rose and C-SPAN.

Ken Auletta

7 p.m. April 19
Whittenberger Auditorium, Indiana Memorial Union

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Ken Auletta

Author and journalist Ken Auletta’s new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, zoomed up the best-seller lists upon its publication last November. No stranger to profiling information age movers and shakers, Auletta in this book profiles Google’s evolution from search engine to architect of the digital media age. Since 1992, his work in The New Yorker has examined the lives of Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Bill Gates and other media moguls, and his 2001 article on Ted Turner earned a National Magazine Award for best profile of the year.

Early on, Auletta served in the Peace Corps, then worked in political campaigns in the 1960s. By the 1970s, he began crafting a journalism career that has included editing, reporting, working as a columnist and serving as a broadcast political commentator. One of the first to report on the implications of the “information superhighway,” he followed the story beginning in the early 1990s, dissecting companies and idealists who engineered the shift from traditional to digital media. He has won many awards for his work, as well as has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror.

Auletta’s other books include Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed And Glory On Wall Street: The Fall of The House of Lehman; The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Super Highway; and World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies.


Each semester, the series aims to bring professional journalists to the area to talk to students and area residents about their work and careers. Previous guests have included Bob Woodward, Anna Quindlen, Lisa Ling, David Halberstam, Nina Totenberg and Elizabeth Gilbert.

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