Mark Danner

Research Expertise and Interest

foreign affairs, voting and elections, journalism, Central America, politics, Balkans, Haiti, documentaries, terrorism, the Middle East, contemporary literature, modernist writers, contemporary literature and film

Research Description

Mark Danner is a professor in the School of Journalism and the Department of English.  He is a writer and reporter who for thirty-five years has written on politics and foreign affairs, focusing on war and conflict, and on politics. He has covered Central America, Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the Middle East, and the War on Terror, among many other stories. Danner has also covered every American presidential election since 2000 and has written a great deal lately on Donald Trump. As Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair Danner teaches in the Graduate School of Journalism and in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley and is also James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College. Among his books are The Massacre at El Mozote, Torture and Truth, The Secret Way to War, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War and Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. Danner was a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Aperture, and many other newspapers and magazines. He has co-written and helped produce two hour-long documentaries for the ABC News program Peter Jennings Reporting. His work has received, among other honors, a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, an Emmy, and a Guggenheim. In 1999 Danner was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2016 he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. He is a longtime resident curator at the Telluride Film Festival. He speaks and lectures widely on foreign policy, politics and America's role in the world.

In the News

Five Berkeleyans among 2019 Guggenheim winners

Five UC Berkeley professors are among this year’s 168 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellows. The prestigious fellowships recognize scholars with impressive achievements who also show promise in fields ranging from the natural sciences to the creative arts.

Featured in the Media

Please note: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of UC Berkeley.
April 17, 2019
Five Berkeley professors have won John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowships this year. The honor recognizes highly accomplished scholars who show exceptional promise in the creative arts and humanities. The Berkeley honorees are associate history professor Brian DeLay for U.S. history; history professor James Vernon for European and Latin American history; art history professor Julia Bryan-Wilson for fine arts research; English and journalism professor Mark Danner for general nonfiction; and literature, rhetoric and classics professor James Porter for classics. For more on this, see our story at Berkeley News. Another story on this topic appeared in Art & Education.
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