William Allen

William Allen is a writer, journalist, teacher and historian. He is emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and author of Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica (Oxford University Press, 2001). He began his career at the City News Bureau of Chicago in 1977 on the police beat and later became a specialist in science, environment, medical, social justice and, more recently, drone journalism. His freelancing has appeared in Yale Environment360, the Guardian and the Washington Post. He joined the Missouri faculty in 2004. Allen’s honors include the Media Spotlight Award of Amnesty International-USA. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a Ford Environmental Journalism Fellow in Nicaragua for the International Center for Journalists. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and master’s degrees in history and in journalism from the University of Illinois.