Nieman News

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (March 1, 2001) — Roger Cohen, Berlin Correspondent for the New York Times, will deliver the annual Joe Alex Morris Jr. memorial lecture at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University on Wednesday, March 7.

Cohen, 45, has been a foreign correspondent for The Times since 1992. Before taking the post in Berlin in 1998, Cohen was a correspondent in Paris. From April 1994 to June 1995 he was The Times bureau chief in Zagreb. From January 1992 to April 1994 he was the European economics correspondent based in Paris.

“Roger Cohen’s reportage from the trouble spots of eastern Europe and the Middle East is very much in the tradition of Joe Alex Morris,” said Bob Giles, the Nieman Foundation’s curator. “The passion and the authority he brings to his work places him among the best of today’s correspondents and a natural choice to present this annual lecture.”

The lecture in memory of Joe Alex Morris Jr., a longtime Middle East correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, honors an American overseas correspondent or media commentator on foreign affairs. The selection is made by the Nieman Foundation in consultation with current class of Nieman Fellows. The award includes appointment by the Harvard Corporation as a Visiting Nieman Fellow.

Morris, a 1949 Harvard graduate, was killed while covering the Iranian revolution in Tehran in February 1979. Before joining the Los Angeles Times in 1965, he was a reporter with The Minneapolis Tribune, The Hartford Times and a foreign correspondent for United Press International, Newsweek, and The International Herald Tribune. He is survived by his father, also a journalist; his wife, Ulla; and their three children.

In 1999 Cohen received the Overseas Press Club Citation for excellence in the books for “Hearts Grown Brutal: Saga of Sarajevo.” In 1995 he won the Overseas Press Club of America Burger Human Rights Award for his investigation of torture and murder at a Serb-run Bosnian concentration camp.

He is also the co-author of a biography of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, “In the Eye of the Storm,” published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1991. Before joining The Times, Cohen was a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Europe, the Middle East and South America. Prior to that, he was a foreign correspondent for Reuters, based in London, Brussels and then Rome.

In 1977, Cohen received a Masters of Arts degree in history and French from Oxford University.

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