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Shareen Blair Brysac | |
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Notable awards | Five Emmys, a DuPont Citation, a George Foster Peabody Award, a Writers Guild Award, medals from New York and Chicago film festivals. |
Spouse | Karl E. Meyer |
Shareen Blair Brysac is an author of non-fiction books and a former dancer, television producer/director/writer.
Brysac was born in Denver, Colorado, and graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University. While at Barnard, she attended the Juilliard School and danced as a member of the José Limón and Merce Cunningham Companies. After her graduation, she also appeared with the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Europe and with the New York City Opera ballet.
In 1974 she began working for CBS News as a producer/director of documentaries for the network. Her documentaries 1968, American Dream, American Nightmare, [1] The Cowboy, the Craftsman, and the Ballerina, and Juilliard and Beyond: A Life in Music, Once in Lifetime won five Emmys, a DuPont Citation, a George Foster Peabody Award, [2] a Writers Guild Award, medals from New York and Chicago film festivals, and a special invitation to the Edinburgh Film Festival.
From 1985 to 1987 she was first program manager for CUNY TV, the cable television station for the City University of New York and subsequently she was a member of the Media Faculty of the Borough of Manhattan Community College. In 1989, she founded and directed the Campus Programming Service designed to bring foreign programming to university television stations for which she received a Rockefeller Grant.
Brysac is a past member of the American Guild of Musical Artists, the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Teachers' Union, and Women in Film. She is currently a member of the Authors Guild.
In 1999, she was the co-author with her husband, Karl E. Meyer, of Tournament of Shadows: the Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. [3] It was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times [4] and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize [5] for "the world's best non-fiction book in English that seeks to deepen public debate on significant global issues." It was republished with a new introduction in 2006 by Basic Books.
Her biography, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Biography Book of the Year [6] and the German edition of the book published by Scherz Verlag was selected as one of the best books of the year by German reviewers.
Kingmakers: the Invention of the Modern Middle East appeared in 2008. Written together with her husband, it was chosen as one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post . [7] Excerpts appeared in Harper's Magazine and the World Policy Journal . Her expanded chapter on Gertrude Bell was selected to appear in Ultimate Adventures with Britannia. [8]
Meyer and Brysac's book entitled Pax Ethnica: Where and Why Diversity Succeeds received support from the Gould, Carnegie, and Pulitzer Foundations. [9] I It was a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize.
The China Collectors: America's Century-Long Hunt for Asian Art Treasures (2014) named one of the Washington Post's Books of the Year.
Brysac has also been a contributing editor to Archaeology magazine and a frequent contributor to Military History Quarterly. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times , The Herald Tribune , The Washington Post , The World Policy Journal and The Nation .
During the fall term Michaelmas 2012, she was in residence as a senior associate member of St. Antony's College, Oxford.
Brysac's television appearances include Dance in America (PBS), WISC, WNYC, CNN and three hours on C-SPAN’s Book Talk. [10] [11] [12] [13]
She has lectured at universities and local libraries including the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Newark Museum, the Explorer's Club, the Royal Asiatic Society (London), Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (Berlin), Maschinenbau (Essen), the National Arts Club, English Speaker's Union, Prologue Clubs (Florida), German Information Center (New York), Asia Society (Houston), Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and the German Cultural Foundation (Philadelphia).
Dame Flora Louise Shaw, Lady Lugard, was a British journalist and writer. She is credited with having coined the name Nigeria.
Wilhelm Guddorf was a Belgian journalist, anti-Nazi and resistance fighter against the Third Reich. Guddorf was a leading member of a Berlin anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Guddorf was the editor of the Marxist-Communist Die Rote Fahne newspaper.
Arvid Harnack was a German jurist, Marxist economist, Communist, and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany. Harnack came from an intellectual family and was originally a humanist. He was strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to a Marxist-Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the Nazis' appearance. After starting an undercover discussion group based at the Berlin Abendgymnasium, he met Harro Schulze-Boysen, who ran a similar faction. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that supplied military and economic intelligence to the Soviet Union. The group was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. He and his American-born wife, Mildred Fish, were executed by the Nazi regime in 1942 and 1943, respectively.
Mildred Elizabeth Harnack was an American literary historian, translator, and member of the German resistance against the Nazi regime. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved to Germany in 1929, where she began her career as an academic. Mildred Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. Mildred Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin in 1931.
Miles Axe Copeland Jr. was an American musician, businessman, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) founding member best known for his relationship with Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his public commentary on intelligence matters. Copeland participated in numerous covert operations, including the March 1949 Syrian coup d'état and the 1953 Iranian coup d'état.
George Trebeck (1800–1825) was born in Middlesex, England in the year 1800. He moved to Calcutta, Bengal Presidency circa 1815 with his father Charles Trebeck and brother of the same name. George Trebeck, who was trained as a solicitor, was recruited by William Moorcroft at the age of 19 as his geographer and draftsman and second-in-charge of an expedition to Central Asia, ostensibly to find horses. Along with Moorcroft, Trebeck travelled through the Himalayan provinces of United Provinces, the Punjab, Ladakh, Kashmir, Peshawar, Kabul, Kunduz and Bokhara. They were unable to purchase horses. During the return journey, both Moorcroft and Trebeck died of illness, Trebeck a few months after Moorcroft in late 1825, in Mazar, Afghanistan.
Martha Eccles Dodd was an American journalist and novelist. The daughter of William Edward Dodd, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first Ambassador to Germany, Dodd lived in Berlin from 1933–1937 and was a witness to the rise of the Third Reich. She became involved in left-wing politics after she witnessed first-hand the violence of the Nazi state. With her second husband, Alfred Stern Jr., she engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union from before World War II until the height of the Cold War.
Brooke Dolan II was an American adventurer and naturalist in the 1930s and 1940s. His father was Brooke Dolan, a wealthy American industrialist in Philadelphia. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant and captain.
Colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, 6th Baronet was an English traveller, Conservative Party politician, and diplomatic advisor, particularly with regard to the Middle East at the time of the First World War.
Karl E. Meyer was an American-based journalist. The third generation of his family to be engaged in that occupation, Meyer's grandfather, George Meyer, was the editor of the leading German language newspaper in Milwaukee, the Germania; his father, Ernest L. Meyer, was a columnist for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin and then the New York Post. In 1979, he joined The New York Times as the senior writer for foreign affairs, a position he held until his retirement in 1998.
Lieselotte "Lilo" Fürst-Ramdohr was a member of the Munich branch of the student resistance group White Rose in Nazi Germany. She was born in Aschersleben.
Manfred Roeder was a military judge in Nazi Germany. Serving on the highest wartime court, he led the investigation and examinations and later the prosecution of the German Resistance group, the Red Orchestra. He shared responsibility for the dozens of death sentences handed down by the Reich court martial to Red Orchestra members. After Germany's defeat in World War II, there were attempts by survivors, family and the U.S. Army to investigate the prosecutions of Red Orchestra members and others, but Roeder was never convicted of any malfeasance or crime since the Allies wanted information from him about the Russians to aid them in the nascent Cold War.
George Norbert Kates was an American exponent of classical Chinese culture and decorative arts. His memoir of life in 1930s Beijing—The Years That Were Fat, Peking 1933-1940 is a widely read memoir of pre-revolution China. He also wrote one of the first texts on Chinese classical furniture—Chinese Household Furniture and put together a significant private collection of Ming style hardwood furniture.
Zofia Poznańska, also known as Zosia, Zosha, or Sophia was a Polish antifascist and resistance fighter of the Soviet-affiliated espionage group that the German Abwehr intelligence service later called the "Red Orchestra".
Mikhail Varfolomeevich Makarov was a Russian national and career Soviet GRU officer with rank of lieutenant, who was one of the organizers of a Soviet intelligence network in Belgium and Netherlands, that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. His aliases were Alamo, Carlos Alamo and Chemnitz. In March 1939, Makarov became associated with Leopold Trepper, a Soviet intelligence agent who would later run a large espionage network in Europe. Makarov was captured on the 13 December 1941 by the Abwehr and later executed in Plötzensee Prison in 1942.
Karl Behrens He was a design engineer and resistance fighter against Nazism. Behrens was most notable for being a member of the Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group, that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Behrens acted as a courier for the group, passing reports between Arvid Harnack and Hans Coppi who was the radioman. Behrens was also active in a resistance group at the AEG turbine factory power together with Walter Homann and others.
Herbert Gollnow was a German resistance fighter, consulate secretary and later second lieutenant in the Luftwaffe. Gollnow career was influenced by Harro Schulze-Boysen while Gollnow studied at the Faculty for Foreign Studies of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, and as he rose through the ranks of the Luftwaffe, he became a counter-intelligence officer in the Luftwaffe and an informer to Schulze-Boyen. Gollnow became a member of a Berlin anti-fascist resistance group that was associated with Schulze-Boysen, that was later called the Red Orchestra. He was later arrested and executed in 1943.
Fritz Thiel was a German precision engineer and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. He became part of a Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group during World War II, that was later named the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Thiel along with his wife Hannelore were most notable for printing stickers using a child's toy rubber stamp kit, that they used to protest The Soviet Paradise exhibition in May 1942 in Berlin, that was held by the German regime to justify the war with the Soviet Union. The group found the exhibition both egregious and horrific; one exhibited photograph showed a young woman and her children hanged side by side. Thiel was executed for his resistance action.
Clara Leiser was an American writer, journalist, and activist. Traveling frequently to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, she documented the situation of family members of political prisoners in Nazi Germany and published one of those accounts, as well as an (anonymous) interview with the director of a Nazi prison. She was affected by the plight of refugee children who were forced to flee fascism, and founded a non-profit that supported them, promoting peace through correspondence programs, which she continued still in the mid-1950s.
Walter Husemann was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. As a young man, Husemann trained an industrial toolmaker, before training as a journalist. He became interested in politics and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). With the arrival of the Nazis in 1933, he became a resistance fighter and through his wife, the actor Marta Husemann, he became associated with an anti-fascist resistance group around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. Along with John Sieg whom he met in the KPD and Fritz Lange, Martin Weise and Herbert Grasse he wrote and published the resistance magazine, The Internal Front Die Innere Front.