Nicholas Lemann

Nicholas Berthelot Lemann is an American writer and academic, and is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Lemann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

Early life and education

Nicholas Lemann was born, raised, and educated in a Jewish family in New Orleans. He describes his family's faith as a "kind of super-Reform Judaism" where there were "no kosher laws, no bar mitzvahs, no tallit, no kippot".

He was educated at Metairie Park Country Day School, a private school in New Orleans, from which he graduated in 1972, followed by Harvard University, where he studied American history and literature, and was president of The Harvard Crimson, where he wrote the Brass Tacks column, and from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1976.

On September 1, 2003, Lemann became dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. During Lemann's time as dean, the Journalism School launched and completed its first capital fundraising campaign, added 20 members to its full-time faculty, built a student center, started its first new professional degree program since the 1930s, and launched initiatives in investigative reporting, digital journalism, executive leadership for news organizations, and other areas. He stepped down as dean in 2013, following two five-year terms.

In 2015, Lemann launched Columbia Global Reports, a university-funded publishing imprint that produces four to six ambitious works of journalism and analysis a year, each on a different underreported story in the world. From 2017 to early 2021, he was the director of Columbia World Projects.

Lemann is the author or editor of several books, including Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries (2026), Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019), Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (2006); The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999); and The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991), which won several book prizes. He has written widely for such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Slate; worked in documentary television with Blackside, Inc., Frontline, the Discovery Channel, and the BBC; and lectured at many universities.

Lemann serves on the boards of directors of the Authors Guild, the National Academy of Sciences' Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and the Academy of Political Science, and is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April 2010. have two sons, Alexander and Theodore, and later divorced. His second wife is Judith Anne Shulevitz, a columnist for Slate, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Republic. Married on November 7, 1999, they have a son and a daughter.