USC Annenberg Announces Knight Luce Fellows
The USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism announced the recipients of the 2011 Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion.
From a pool of more than 50 applicants, seven American journalists have been chosen to receive stipends from $5,000 to $25,000 to report on religion around the world.
“The number and quality of the proposals we received demonstrate the variety of important stories that can be told about global religion,” said Diane Winston, holder of the Knight Chair in Media and Religion and journalism professor at USC Annenberg. “We identified projects that illustrate the impact of religion worldwide, from the political to the personal, and can be posted, printed, broadcast and published across media platforms.”
Within the six-month period of their fellowship, fellows will report and develop stories for delivery on multiple platforms.
Stipends will support the following projects:
• Kael Alford will produce a series of character-driven multimedia pieces, short photo essays and written stories about the political and personal place of religion in the lives of Iraqis and the perceived role religion has played in Iraq’s civil conflict since the U.S.-led war began in 2003.
• Caryle Murphy will examine Saudi Arabia’s global export of its particular brand of Islam a decade after 9/11. A Pulitzer Prize winner and freelance journalist based in Saudi Arabia, Murphy will produce a multimedia project for Global Post that illuminates an internal division among some of the Sunni faithful.
• Tim McGirk, former Time magazine Jerusalem bureau chief and award-winning war correspondent, will report on “Reincarnation in Exile.” He will cover Tibetan Buddhists, identified as reincarnated lamas, or rimpoches, who renounce their exalted positions to pursue a normal life. The story will take McGirk to Dharamsala, India and Madrid.
• Kathryn Joyce will investigate the burgeoning U.S. evangelical adoption movement and orphan theology, reporting on international adoption in Rwanda and Liberia. Joyce, who has published in Mother Jones, Newsweek and Salon, is a three-time recipient of reporting support from the Nation Institute Fund for Investigative Journalism. She also is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
• Radio and print reporter Daniel Estrin will report on efforts to investigate the Jewish heritage of some one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel. He will travel from Jerusalem to Cyprus and Ukraine to explore complexities that arise when a country constructs its immigration policy according to religious criteria.
• Joanna Kakissis will follow the story of Hazara immigrants who left Afghanistan due to Taliban persecution and are now facing hostility in communities-in-exile in Pakistan and, more recently, Greece. Kakissis’ work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, The Financial Times Magazine, NPR and BBC/PRI’s The World.
• Reporting from Argentina, which became the first Latin-American nation to legalize same-sex marriage in July 2010, Nicole Greenfield will examine the complex relationship among religion, politics and LGBT rights in Buenos Aires. Greenfield is a freelance journalist based in New York City.
At the completion of their projects, several fellows will spend three days in residence at USC to present their work, hold master classes for journalism students and give public lectures for the USC community.
The Henry Luce Foundation was established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc. The foundation, which strives to broaden knowledge and encourage the highest standards of service and leadership, pursues its mission through a variety of grant-making programs, including the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.
USC Annenberg professor Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion.