Lang Visiting Professorship for Issues of Social Change

Endowed by Eugene M. Lang ’38, the Lang Visiting Professorship brings to Swarthmore outstanding social scientists, political leaders, and social activists whose careers demonstrate sustained engagement with major issues of social justice, civil liberties, human rights, and democracy. Along with the sponsoring academic department, the Lang Visiting Professorship is co-hosted by the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.

View the list of previous Eugene Lang Visiting Professors for Issues of Social Change.

Current Lang Visiting Professor

Ted Gup—esteemed journalist, award-winning author, and longtime educator—will be joining us as the 2023-24 Lang Visiting Professor for Social Change. In Fall 2023 he will be offering ENGL 006, “Investigative Journalism as an Agent of Social Change.” He is also eager to mentor our student journalists across a range of media formats.

Gup is a former staff writer and editor for The Washington Post who worked under the legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. He later wrote for and edited Time magazine, covering Congress and the environment, and then served as Time’s Washington investigative correspondent. Gup's work has appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones, The Nation, Politico, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Huffington Post, NPR, the Harvard International Journal of Press and Politics, National Geographic, Slate, and GQ, among other outlets.

An experienced educator, Gup has taught at Williams College, Johns Hopkins University, Brown University, Georgetown University, and Emerson College. He studied Classics and English as an undergraduate at Brandeis and at Trinity College (Dublin), and later graduated from Case Western Reserve Law School and was admitted to the DC bar.

Gup has been honored with the George Polk Award, the Worth Bingham Prize, the Gerald Loeb Award and the Book-of-the-Year Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist in national reporting. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the following institutions:  Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; Harvard Law School’s Safra Center for Ethics; and Durham University’s Institute for Advanced Study (UK). He also has been a Fulbright Scholar and a grantee of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Gup has written three nonfiction books: The Book of Honor: Covert Lives and Classified Deaths at the CIA (2000), which became a New York Times and Washington Post best-seller; Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life (2007), winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize; and A Secret Gift, an unknown story of the Great Depression (2010).