Bio

Howard W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he has taught both journalism and photography since 2008.

For many years, he was a Senior Writer for The New York Times, where he spent most of a nearly 23 year career as a foreign correspondent, working in and traveling to over 100 countries on five continents.

Until July 2008, he was the chief of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau. Prior to this assignment, he headed bureaus in Japan, West and Central Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Mr. French’s work for the newspaper in both Africa and in China has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has won numerous other awards, including the Overseas Press Club award and the Grantham Prize. French speaks English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish, and is conversant in other languages.

From 1979 to 1986, he lived in West Africa, where he worked as a translator, taught English literature at the University of Ivory Coast, and lived as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post and other publications.

French is the author of A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Knopf 2004), which was named non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers. “Continent” won the 2005 American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Non-Fiction, and was a finalist for both the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and for the Hurston-Wright Foundation’s non-fiction prize.

“Disappearing Shanghai,” French’s documentary photography of the last remnants of Shanghai’s historic old neighborhoods has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia, and reprinted in numerous magazines. Prints from Disappearing Shanghai have been acquired by the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, as part of its permanent collection, and shown in solo exhibition there.

“Disappearing Shanghai” will be published as a book by Homa and Sekey in Spring 2012. The work is a collaboration with the novelist and poet, Qiu Xiaolong, a Shanghai native, who will contribute original writings.

Under contract with Knopf, French is also at work on a non fiction manuscript about China’s relationship with Africa. Completion is expected in Spring 2012.

French contributes often to a variety of publications, including The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books, and has written numerous book reviews for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He is also a frequent public speaker.

French was a 2010-’11 fellow of the Open Society Foundations. He is also a board member of the Columbia Journalism Review, and he currently resides in New York City.

For more information, please contact Howard French at globetrotter@howardwfrench.com