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Edward Said
Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University died of leukemia in New York on the evening of September 24th. He was 67. Said, a Palestinian was born in Jerusalem on November 1, 1935 and was educated in English language schools in Cairo after his family moved to Egypt. He completed his education in the US, earning his undergraduate degree at Princeton, and his doctorate at Harvard. Perhaps best known to critical criminologists as a postcolonial theorist and author of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, Said was heavily influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci, and in many respects, was Gramsci’s “organic intellectual”. He was a strong advocate for the Palestinian cause and an outspoken critic of Israel and US policy in the Middle East. From 1977-1991 Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council, a parliament in exile, and in 1988 he translated the Palestinian Declaration of Independence into English. Said wrote and edited over a dozen books, and regularly contributed columns to The Nation. His work crossed numerous disciplinary boundaries including sociology, criminology, cultural studies, political science and literary criticism. Dr. Said is survived by his wife Mariam, his children Najla and Wadie, his daughter-in-law Jennifer, and his sisters Rosemary Zahlan, Jean Makdisi, Joyce Said, and Grace Said. |
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Neil Postman
Neil Postman, Professor of Culture and Communication at New York University died of lung cancer in New York on October 5th. He was 72. Postman, a native New Yorker, earned his undergraduate degree from SUNY – Fredonia, and his master’s and doctorate in education from the Teachers College, Columbia. He taught at NYU for forty years. In 1971, he founded the programme in media ecology at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education. Postman was a prolific scholar and vociferous social critic who authored twenty books and edited Et Cetera, the journal of the International Society for General Semantics, for a decade. His influence on critical criminology is most evident in the areas of media studies, newsmaking criminology and critical constructionism. Postman will likely best be remembered for Amusing Ourselves to Death, a scathing indictment of the way television news transforms serious social problems into info-tainment for mass consumption. Less well known, though no less insightful was The End of Education, in which he stressed the importance of alternative curricula in fostering healthy intellectual skepticism and a sense of global citizenship. In 1993 he was appointed a University Professor and served as the chair of his department until last year. Dr. Postman is survived by his wife Shelley, his children, Madeline, Marc and Andrew, four grandchildren, his brother Jack, and sister Ruth.
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