Douglas Foster is a Professor of Journalism in Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. He earned a BA in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining academia, Foster worked as the editor of a national magazine, public television investigative reporter and correspondent, and documentary producer. He authored After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa, published by Liveright in 2012. Foster writes on politics, global issues, and science for The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Scholar, and the Los Angeles Times. He has contributed to three collections covering investigative reporting, environmental journalism, and memoir. His recent reporting addresses swing voters in the 2020 campaign, South Africa’s democracy on the 30th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, new tuberculosis treatments, neuroscience theories on remembering and forgetting, and interventions in youth violence patterns in Chicago.

Foster teaches graduate and undergraduate students in magazine writing and global journalism through intensive practicum workshops that emphasize immersion reporting for feature stories, sustained narrative presentation, and challenges in covering news across lines of class, ethnicity, nation, language, and culture. He serves as faculty advisor for the Journalism Residency Program in South Africa and the student chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. His teaching adapts contemporary storytelling techniques amid technological and generational changes. Foster has won awards for investigative reporting on product safety from Investigative Reporters and Editors, a local Emmy for a television documentary on medical malpractice, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Investigative Reporting from the American Society of Magazine Editors. His expertise spans investigative reporting, immersion reporting, science reporting, political reporting, feature writing, environmental reporting, global patterns of inequality, social movements in the developing world, responsible cross-cultural reporting, and the political landscape in post-apartheid South Africa.

Professional Email: dmfoster@northwestern.edu