Peter Laufer brief bio

Journalist, author and professor Peter Laufer reports on borders, identities and migration along with the relationships of humans to other animals. A former and longtime global correspondent for NBC News, he’s covered the requisite wars and earthquakes, coups and elections. His NBC documentary on Americans in prisons overseas received the James Polk Award and his broadcast journalism has won a plethora of other prizes. His books include studies of the Mexican-U.S. frontier crises, the collapse of the Iron Curtain and a natural history quartet that looks at turtles, butterflies, exotic pets and animal abuse. His most recent book is Up Against the Wall: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border and he currently is researching and writing O Say Can We See: Two Extraordinary Decades. That work is based on his cross-America trips immediately after 9/11, ten year later and in the midst of the Trump/pandemic era. Laufer talked butterflies on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart, traded migration opinions with Bill O’Reilly on Fox TV, lectured passengers about butterflies on the Queen Mary 2, held forth of CSPAN’s “Book TV” about soldiers opposed to the Iraq invasion and headlined at regarding turtles at Toronto’s Ideacity conference. Peter Laufer holds the inaugural James Wallace Chair in Journalism at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication where he was awarded the Marshall Prize for teaching innovation. He lives in Eugene, Oregon, and Marin County, California.