Author and journalist Masha Gessen will give the Robison Lecture at Bradley University on Tuesday, September 12, at 7 p.m. in the Peplow Pavilion in the Hayden-Clark Alumni Center. A book signing and reception will follow.
Gessen is a Russian and American journalist as well as an outspoken activist who writes about human rights violations, gender issues, and the cultural and political climate in Russia.
As a journalist living in Moscow, Gessen experienced the rise of Vladimir Putin firsthand. In her 2012 bestselling book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, she gave the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.
Gessen regularly contributes to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and Slate, among other publications. She lives in New York.
Since the Robison Lectureship Series began in 1988, Bradley's Department of Communication has hosted more than 30 journalists and journalism educators. The Robison Lecturer program was established in memory of Mary Leslie Robison, an educator and journalist for more than 40 years. She was an assistant professor of English at Bradley from 1957 to 1968. In 1953, the Illinois Association of Journalism Teachers honored her with a gold key for meritorious service to scholastic journalism.
