James Harkin is the director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. He is a journalist who covers social change and political conflict and whose work appears in Vanity Fair, Harper’s, GQ, The Smithsonian, Prospect and the Guardian. A former director of talks at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), he once taught politics at Oxford University, and was associate producer on Adam Curtis’s two BBC series The Trap and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. He has been reporting on the Syrian conflict from all sides. His last book, Hunting Season, an investigative account of the rise of the Islamic State group and its campaign of kidnapping journalists, was published in November 2015 by Little, Brown in the U.K. and Hachette in the U.S.
