Hadani Ditmars - Guest-in-Residence 9/30-10/4

Hadani Ditmars will be a Guest-in-Residence at Unit One/Allen Hall September 30 – October 4. She will be speaking each night of her residency. All events are open to the public and take place in the South Rec Room of Allen Hall, 1005 W. Gregory, Urbana.

Hadani Ditmars is an international journalist based in Canada whose work has been published in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, The London Independent, The Globe and Mail, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, and broadcast on the BBC and CBC radio and television. She has been covering the Middle East since 1992, Iraq since 1997, and has reported from Iran, North Africa, Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Colombia, Indonesia, and Gaza and the West Bank. Her Ms. Magazine essay on Iraqi women has been adopted for many university courses. She is the author of the bestseller, Dancing in the No Fly Zone: a Woman’s Journey Through Iraq, a book that provides a unique perspective on the troubled nation both before and after the US invasion. Her next book is on Israel/Palestine, where she first worked in 1994 for a joint Israeli-Palestinian magazine.

Sunday, September 30
7pm – Opening Program - From Amman to Zanzibar and Beyond: My Journey as a Writer

Monday, October 1
7pm - Dancing in the No Fly Zone: a Woman’s Journey Through Iraq - the best-selling book which chronicles Ditmars’ seven years of pre and post invasion reporting from the troubled nation. The London Independent described it as “touching places in the nation’s soul that horror headlines never reach.”

Tuesday, October 2
7pm - Israel/Palestine/Lebanon: A Journey of Return - As the region hovers on the verge of further wars, Ditmars’ current work provides a very human portrait of a conflicted place that only 100 years ago was part of the same land - balad al shems.

Wednesday, October 3
7pm – The Death of Culture in Iraq - Connections between cultural and political realities in the Middle East.

Thursday, October 4
7pm - International Reportage vs. Paris Hilton – The Battle for Significance in a World of Vacuous News