CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Leon Dash has been appointed director of the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, pending approval by the U. of I. Board of Trustees at its Sept. 10 meeting in Urbana.
A professor of journalism, of African-American studies and of law, Dash is a Pulitzer-prize-winning author and journalist with extensive experience in both domestic and international reporting. Already the holder of a Swanlund Chair, Dash is known particularly for his work in immersion journalism, in which a reporter lives among the story’s subjects and gathers the story over a long period of time.
As a reporter for The Washington Post, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for an eight-part series about a family trapped in urban poverty, and also won several awards for the book that followed. An earlier book on the urban crisis in teenage childbearing, “When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing,” won a PEN/Martha Albrand special citation for nonfiction work.
Dash’s reporting career has also taken him on extensive assignments abroad, including two in the mid 1970s in Angola, where he lived with and reported on guerrilla fighters. He is a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, and was a media fellow in 1995-96 at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Dash earned his bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1968.
Dash joined the faculty at Illinois in 1998. He replaces former director Bill Greenough, who retired in August.
The center is an interdisciplinary forum for scholarly interaction at the Urbana campus and sponsors workshops and seminars featuring distinguished scholars and artists.
