Sylvia Nasar

James S. and John L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism, Columbia University

Holtzbrinck Fellow - Class of Spring 2014

Sylvia Nasar is the first James S. and John L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University, where she co-directs the MA program in business journalism. Nasar was raised in Germany and Turkey, studied literature at Antioch College (BA, 1970), economics at New York University (MA, 1976), and has been awarded honorary doctorates from both De Paul University (2005) and Niagara University (2011). Author of the bestselling biography A Beautiful Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1998), published in thirty languages and the inspiration behind Ron Howard’s eponymous Academy Award-winning movie, Nasar recently published Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius (2011), part of a larger narrative about twentieth-century economists. Nasar has been a New York Times economics correspondent, a staff writer at Fortune, and a columnist at US News & World Report. Her work has appeared in, among others, the New Yorker, Newsweek, and the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Nasar received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, was named Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography in 1998, and has held fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, and Kings and Churchill Colleges, Cambridge University. Nasar is also a 2013-14 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.

Project Description

Endgame: Soviet Collaborators, Spies, and Agents of Influence at the End of WWII

In her Academy project, “Endgame: Soviet Collaborators, Spies, and Agents of Influence at the End of WWII,” Nasar describes how George Orwell, Gunnar Myrdal, and other Western intellectuals were convinced that the world would be split into two warring empires. In her words: “This is a story of privileged men and women, many of them economists and scientists, who were singled out for success in their own countries but saw the world in apocalyptic terms, felt that they had to choose sides, and, in a remarkable number of cases, chose to collaborate with the other side. Present at the creation of the Cold War in the months between D-Day and Hiroshima, they included a high level British planner of the D-Day invasion [and] the co-creator of the post-war financial system and the organizer of the founding meeting of the United Nations, FDR’s White House economic adviser….The narrative begins with my father, a Muslim from the remote Asian territories of the Soviet Union, who finds himself, in 1945, caught between the victors, and manages to evade imprisonment and death and to change sides for a third and final time.”

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