Michael Dobbs, visiting professor of communications and former Washington Post Warsaw correspondent. Sponsor: CREES.
Michael Dobbs is an American non-fiction author. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at the University of York, he has been a reporter for the Washington Post since 1980, when he joined the paper as its Warsaw correspondent. He was the Post’s bureau chief in Eastern Europe (1980-81), Paris (1982-86), and Moscow (1988-93).
Dobbs spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. He was the first Western journalist to visit the Gdansk shipyard in August 1980, and also covered the Tiananmen Square uprising in China in 1989 and the abortive coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. He also reported on the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
His book Down with Big Brother: The Fall of The Soviet Empire was a runner-up for the 1997 PEN award for nonfiction. His hour-by-hour study of the Cuban missile crisis, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War, was a finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times history prize and was named one of five non-fiction books of the year by the Washington Post. Other books include a biography of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America.
*This is a class lecture that is open to the public. The course, History 331 “Poland in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” is taught by Professor Brian Porter-Szucs.
