The American University of Beirut is pleased to announce the receipt of the personal papers of the late Mr. Anthony Shadid (1968 – 2012), a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the Middle East throughout his brilliant career.
The gift, donated to the University Libraries, comprises 30 boxes of notebooks, papers, and related records covering Shadid’s work as a journalist and foreign correspondent for over two decades in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Over the course of his career, Shadid worked at the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. The rich archive contains books, notes, materials relating to media studies, journalism, the history and politics of the modern Middle East, diaspora studies, and Arab-American relations, and are a treasure trove for researchers. The collection was entrusted to the Archives and Special Collections Department of the University Libraries by Mr. Shadid’s father, wife, children, and siblings, who hope to contribute to timely, nuanced, and relevant research about Middle Eastern studies from and about the region. The Archives and Special Collections Department is working to organize and index the papers to make them available to researchers and interested scholars as soon as possible.
An American of Lebanese origin, Shadid was born in Oklahoma City and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was married to Ms. Nada Bakri, also a reporter for the New York Times. In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and 2010, Shadid was the recipient of numerous other journalism awards, including the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, the Michael Kelly Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Hal Boyle Award for best newspaper or wire service reporting from abroad, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award for best deadline writing. He also won the Ridenhour Book Prize for his book, Night Draws Near (2006), on the devastating effects of the US occupation of Iraq on Iraqi citizens.
Mr. Shadid’s ties to Lebanon and to AUB ran very deep. In 2008, he served as the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at AUB’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs. He frequently lectured at AUB on a variety of topics and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University in 2011. Shadid paid homage to his family’s hometown and his final resting place, Marja‘yun, in his book House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East. He passed away in 2012 while on assignment for the New York Times in Syria.
AUB would like to thank the Shadid family for their trust and generosity in choosing the AUB Libraries as the home for Mr. Shadid’s extraordinary legacy. The University hopes to deepen the understanding of the region’s history and politics by preserving and providing access to this precious collection. The archives will serve as a touchstone for future generations who aspire to write about the region. As IFI Founding Director and Senior Policy Fellow Rami Khoury stated, “[Mr. Shadid’s] now widely noted special qualities [will] infuse the work and attitudes of those thousands of journalists who still deal with the Middle East and the Arab world, as writers, editors, reporters and producers.”
For any inquiries related to the collection, please feel free to contact us at: asc@aub.edu.lb or 01-350000 x 2609/10, 2635.