dblum

Information

First Name

Deborah L.

Last name

Blum

Title

Professor

Courses taught

Magazine Writing

Creative Nonfiction

Investigative Reporting

Science and Environmental Journalism

Literary Aspects of Journalism

Biography

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and has been a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997.

Blum earned her bachelor’s in journalism from the University of Georgia in 1976, with a double minor in anthropology and political science. She interned for several Georgia papers while in college, as well as serving as a press intern for then-U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, of the Armed Services Committee. After graduation she worked as a general assignment reporter for The Times (Gainesville, Ga.), The Macon Telegraph (Macon, Ga.) and the St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, Fla.) She left the St. Petersburg Times in 1980 to attend graduate school at UW-Madison. She earned her M.A. in journalism, focused on environmental writing, in 1982.

From 1982 to 1984, she worked as an environment/science writer at The Fresno Bee in California. In 1984, she became the first full-time science writer at The Sacramento Bee, where she stayed until joining the UW faculty. During her time in Sacramento, she worked on a series of in-depth projects including a look at chronic disease in the United States and investigations of the AIDS epidemic, global warming and ozone depletion, vanishing species in the west, and mismanagement of nuclear weapons labs in New Mexico in California. That 1989 series on nuclear weapons won numerous national awards, including the Livingston Award in National Reporting and the Olive Branch Award from New York University. She also was awarded a fellowship to an international security program at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Blum then wrote a series on the ethical issues and dilemmas of primate research, “The Monkey Wars,” which won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, the 1992 science-writing award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the 1992 Clarion Award from Women in Communications. It also led Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, to name her an honorary member for her service to science. In 1995, she wrote her last series for The Sacramento Bee, called “Only Human,” which explored biology of behavior and which won the national Sigma Delta Chi award for non-deadline reporting.

Blum expanded her newspaper series on primate research into a book, also called The Monkey Wars, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1994. She followed that working as co-editor on an internationally published guide to science journalism, A Field Guide for Science Writers, which was published by Oxford in 1997. Also in 1997, she published Sex on the Brain, which was a named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. In 2002, she published Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and named a Best Book of the Year by Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly and Discover Magazine. In 2005, Oxford published a second edition of A Field Guide for Science Writers. Her next book, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death, published in 2006 was named one of the 50 hot books of summer in Entertainment Weekly’s summer reading preview edition. In 2010, she published The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, which became an Amazon best seller.

Blum has also written for publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Slate,  The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover, Psychology Today, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone Books, The Utne Reader and More magazine. She was president of the National Association of Science Writers from 2002-2004 and currently serves on advisory boards to the Council for Advancement of Science Writing and the World Federation of Science Journalists.

Recent publications

The Poisoner's Handbook, Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz-Age New York, The Penguin Press, 2010

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death, The Penguin Press, August 2006

Field Guide for Science Writers, second edition, Co-editor (with Robin Marantz Henig and Mary Knudson), Oxford University Press, 2005

Love at Goon Park, Perseus Books, October 2002; paperback, Berkeley, 2003

Email

dblum@wisc.edu

Website

http://deborahblum.com

Education

 

University of Georgia
BA, Journalism, double-minor in anthropology and political science, 1976

University of Wisconsin-Madison
MA, Journalism, 1982

Office

5154 Vilas

Telephone

(608) 263-3395

Office hours

by appt.

History

Member for

2 years 24 weeks