Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review and staff writer forThe New Yorker, will visit Fordham on Thursday, Sept. 25 to talk about Standard Operating Procedure, (Penguin Press, 2008) his gripping and disturbing account of conditions at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison under American occupation in 2004.
In a rare double appearance, Gourevitch, will take part in a panel discussion on his past work at 1 p.m. at the McNally Amphitheatre on the Lincoln Center campus and give a presentation on Standard Operating Procedure at 7 p.m. at the Rose Hill campus.
The panel discussion is set for the Lowenstein Center on the Lincoln Center campus. It will touch upon Gourevitch’s body of writing, including We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Picador, 1999), which won a National Book Critics Circle award.
Included on the panel will be Fordham professors Tom Deluca, Ph.D., professor of political science; Robin Andersen, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies and director of the Peace and Justice Studies Program; and Amir H. Idris, Ph.D., assistant professor of African and African-American studies.
His evening presentation will be held in the McGinley Ballroom at Rose Hill. The first 25 attendees at this event will receive a free copy of Standard Operating Procedure.
Both events, which are free and open to the public, are sponsored in part by Fordham’s American studies program. Glenn Hendler, Ph.D., associate professor of English and director of the American studies program, said that Gourevitch’s book highlights torture, a subject that is being neglected in the current presidential election cycle.
“Gourevitch manages to get into the heads of the people who did some of the horrible things at Abu Ghraib,” Hendler said. “He explains it in a way that ties it to policy decisions and attitudes that reached up to the administration. He makes very clear that this was not just a few bad apples.”
