A former U.S. Senator, the head of newsgathering with the BBC in Northern Ireland, a former national correspondent and columnist with the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and bureau chief for the Canadian Press news agency are among the five Fellows at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy the Kennedy School of Government.

In addition, Sen. Alan Simpson, the Visiting Lecturer in the Laurence M. Lombard Chair, will teach a course, Creating Legislation: Congress and the Press, which will examine the process of creating six specific pieces of legislation, including immigration, gun control, and abortion legislation. Simpson, newly appointed as director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School, will draw on his U.S. Senate experience, his former position as Republican Whip, his work as a lawyer in Cody, Wyo., and his lively encounters with the media. Simpson has more than 30 years of public service. Simpson was elected to the Wyoming State Legislature in 1964 and in 1978, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served for 18 years. In 1984 his peers elected him to the position of assistant Republican leader and served in that capacity until 1994. He is the author of Right in the Old Gazoo (William Morrow & Co., 1997), a book about the relationship between politicians and the media

The Laurence M. Lombard Professorship was established by the family and friends of Laurence M. Lombard, a director of the Dow Jones Co. for 28 years, to help build a substantial body of knowledge concerning the interaction of media and politics and their influence on public policy.

The Fellows and visiting faculty will introduce themselves and discuss their research at a panel discussion on Monday, Feb. 9, at 4:30 p.m. in the Taubman Building (access from Eliot Street), Room 275, at the Kennedy School of Government. The public is invited.

"I am proud to welcome an extraordinary mix of talent to the Shorenstein Center," said Marvin Kalb, director of the Center. "This new crop of fellows and faculty will provide students with journalistic, political, and academic insight and experience of the highest quality."

The 1998 Spring Fellows are:

Lisa Bennett is a writer and faculty member at New York University, where she teaches in the departments of media studies and sociology. Her primary interest is in the media's coverage of minorities. Bennett has worked as a journalist at several newspapers, most recently, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, in Sarasota, Florida. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Newsday, Teaching Tolerance, and American Health magazine. Bennett earned her bachelorÕs and master's degrees from Columbia University. She will examine the media's role, if any, in the perpetuation of prejudice.

Tim Cooke is head of newsgathering for the BBC in Northern Ireland. Headquartered in Belfast, he leads the team of journalists and correspondents who report and analyze events in Northern Ireland for BBC television and radio news. Cooke has worked for the BBC for the past 10 years -- most of them as an onscreen television news correspondent covering the conflict in Northern Ireland. He has also worked for BBC World TV News in London, has reported extensively from Israel and Lebanon, and has been a correspondent in the southwest of England, based in Plymouth. In 1991 he was awarded a BBC World Service Alexander Onassis Fellowship to study the Israeli and Palestinian media in Jerusalem. Cooke holds an honors degree in political science from Queens University, Belfast. His research will focus on the U.S. media coverage of the Clinton administration's involvement in the Irish peace process.

Charlotte Grimes is on leave from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Washington bureau, where she has been a national correspondent and columnist. She was Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University for the 1996 fall semester and was a visiting professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, in 1997. A journalist for 25 years, she has reported for newspapers and radio in North Carolina, Virginia, and Missouri. She has been with the Post-Dispatch since 1978 and in the Washington bureau since 1985. Her assignments have included reporting from Liberia, Japan, China, Panama, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Her work has won local, state, and national awards for investigative reporting and feature writing. Her research will focus on "civic journalism" and whether it is reshaping the coverage of politics and public policy.

Thomas Keenan teaches media studies and literary theory at State University of New York, Binghamton, where he is associate professor of comparative literature. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University and taught previously in the English Department at Princeton University. He is the author of Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford University Press, 1997). He has edited Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943 (University of Nebraska Press, 1988), Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (University of Nebraska Press, 1989), and two volumes on The End(s) of the Museum (Barcelona, Tapies Foundation, 1995-96). He has written on contemporary art and architecture, television coverage of the American intervention in Somalia, AIDS, and new theoretical approaches to the "public sphere." He is currently finishing a book called Live Feed, concerning the news media, humanitarianism, and the post Cold War military. He will examine how military intervention, humanitarianism, and the news media work and do not work together in the post-Cold War era.

Stephen Ward has been bureau chief for the Canadian Press (CP) news agency in Vancouver since 1995. He was CP's European correspondent from 1990 to 1994, based in London, where his foreign reporting assignments included the Gulf War, the Bosnian and Northern Ireland conflicts, and the reunification of Germany. Ward received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, in 1988. His current research interest is in the philosophy of journalism. He has written papers on the education and skills of journalists, the evolution of news objectivity, and the concentration of media ownership in Canada. He will research the foundations of a theory of news objectivity for a new media age.