Joseph Pearson (writer)


Joseph Sanders Pearson is an award-winning Canadian essayist, cultural historian, and journalist.

Life

Between 1997 and 2001, Pearson received his doctorate in Modern History at the University of Cambridge.
Pearson has taught in the humanities at Columbia University, New York University, and the Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2018, he has taught at the Barenboim-Said Academy, a peace project headed by conductor Daniel Barenboim. He is the nephew of children's novelist Kit Pearson.

Career

His history and portrait of the German capital, Berlin, was published by Reaktion Press and University of Chicago Press in 2017. The Independent called Berlin "the last word in explaining not only Berlin’s incredible history, but also its present day cultural situation" and Bloomberg reported that the book "masterfully offers a close reading of the metropolis in all its brutal immediacy". The book was also positively reviewed in The German Studies Review.
Corresponding from Berlin, his work has appeared in Newsweek, The New England Review, the BBC, AGNI, Monocle Magazine, and many other publications. His non-fiction has been translated into German, French, Arabic, Mandarin and other languages.
In 2020, he was awarded the Jacob Zilber Second Prize for Short Fiction, for his story "An Iconostasis".
Pearson is based in Berlin, Germany, where he is the in-house essayist of the Schaubühne Theatre and the editor of The Needle, one of Berlin's most popular blogs.