Pete Hamill will deliver the 2010 Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship Lecture, “They Are Us: Common Sense in Immigration Reform,” on Tuesday, December 7, at 5:00 p.m., at NYU’s Silver Center.
Pete Hamill will deliver the 2010 Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship Lecture, “They Are Us: Common Sense in Immigration Reform,” on Tuesday, December 7, at 5:00 p.m., at NYU’s Silver Center (Hemmerdinger Hall), 100 Washington Square East (at Washington Place). Subway Lines: 6 (Astor Place); A, B, C, D, E, F (West 4th Street); N, R (8th Street).
The lecture, sponsored by New York University and The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation, is free and open to the public, but space is limited. RSVP is required at http://www.nyu.edu/fas/forms/javitsvisitingprofessor/. For more information, call 212.998.2264.
Hamill has authored more than 20 books, including News Is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century and A Drinking Life, as well as the novels Forever and North River. His novel Tabloid City will be published in the spring of 2011. Hamill has reported on wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. He has been a columnist for the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and New York Newsday, the Village Voice, New York magazine, and Esquire. The New York Times has called Hamill a “chronicler of vintage New York City and newspaper tabloids and boozy Greenwich Village literary haunts.”
The Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship at NYU was established to honor the memory and accomplishments of the four-term U.S. Republican Senator from New York, the late Jacob K. Javits, an alumnus of the NYU School of Law, and to perpetuate the values and intellectual integrity for which he stood. The Visiting Professorship is awarded to a distinguished individual—an academic, lawyer, policymaker, journalist, historian, philosopher, or former elected official—whose work focuses on an issue close to the Senator’s interests. These areas include health, civil rights, labor, foreign policy, rights of handicapped individuals, education, and fairness in employment and economic security for working Americans. Among his many accomplishments, Senator Javits introduced legislation that became the War Powers Act of 1973, was a strong advocate and principal sponsor of the ERISA Act (Employment Retirement Income Security Act) providing much needed pension benefit reform, and a staunch supporter and sponsor of the legislation that created the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. Among the many significant awards, he was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.
The Javits Professorship at NYU was inaugurated in 2008, with generous support from The Marian B. and Jacob K. Javits Foundation and its President and Chief Executive Officer, Marian B. Javits, the widow of the late Senator. She continues the work of the Senator to promote excellence in public service, focusing on the education of the next generation of our country’s leaders. Marian Javits is an arts consultant and a patron of the arts. She is the recipient of the pen that President Lyndon Johnson used in signing into law the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities in recognition of her contribution to that legislation. She continues to serve on state and national boards dealing with the arts and humanities, women’s issues, and the mentally handicapped.
Previous honorees as The Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professor at NYU were Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and David Oshinsky, Jack S. Blanton Chair in History, University of Texas and Distinguished Scholar in Residence in NYU’s Department of History.
Hamill, a novelist and former editor of both the New York Post and New York Daily News, is The Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professor for 2010-11 and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. They Are Us, an electronic book about immigration in the United States, is tentatively scheduled for release this fall by Little, Brown & Company.