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Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University

Bosch Fellow in Public Policy - Class of Spring 2011


Todd Gitlin was a noted authority on American culture and media, who combined the academic disciplines of communication, sociology, popular culture, and political science in his work. His recent publications are The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals (Wiley & Sons, 2007), The Intellectuals and the Flag (Columbia University Press, 2006), Letters to a Young Activist (Basic Books, 2003), and The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election, with Liel Leibovitz (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

 

Prior to joining the faculty of Columbia University, where he chaired the PhD Program in communications, Gitlin was a professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University and of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, where he directed the program in mass communications. A former columnist for the New York Observer and the San Francisco Examiner, Gitlin was a regular contributor to the “Entanglements” blog at the New Republic Online, and to tpmcafe.com. He contributed to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Dissent, and New Republic, among others. He appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including on PBS, ABC, CBS, CNN, and NPR. In addition to his scholarly work, Gitlin published a book of poetry and two novels, The Murder of Albert Einstein (Bantam, 1994) and Sacrifice (Metropolitan Books, 1999), which won the Harold U. Ribalow Prize for Fiction on Jewish themes. Counterpoint published his third novel, Undying, in February 2011.

Gitlin passed away on February 5, 2022.

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