The DMJ Department is proud to announce the Fall 2025 DMJ470 Ottaway Seminar, taught by Lauren Sandler, the James H. Ottaway Sr. Visiting Professor of Journalism. This course will focus on “Writing the Argument.”

In our hot-take culture, few arguments actually change readers’ perspectives. The ones that do require evidence, credibility, and excellent writing – all the hallmarks of great journalism. This seminar will engage with the world in real time, and with each other, as students develop the rigor and personal voice to write about what matters most.

Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author based in Brooklyn. She is currently reporting and writing a book for Random House about an ideological divided Southern family, as a way to understand how we’ve arrived at the brink of civil war. She’s also been at work on a musical — co-writing with playwright Kirsten Greenidge and composer Crystal Monee Hall — based on her reporting in a Brooklyn shelter.

Her most recent book is the bestselling This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, a work of narrative nonfiction about a young homeless mother in New York. It was named a Notable book of 2020 by the New York Times. Lauren is the author of two previous books, the bestselling One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One and Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement.

In addition to her journalism, Lauren has lead the OpEd Project’s Public Voices Fellowships at Yale, Columbia, UVA, and Dartmouth, and has taught in the graduate journalism program at NYU, where she has also been Visiting Scholar. She was a regular commentator for the BBC and has been interviewed nationally and internationally on many networks including CNN, PBS, CBS, NBC, and throughout public radio.

The course will be taught during the Fall 2025 semester on Mondays, 3:30-4:45 pm.