Biography
Eyal Press is a writer based in New York and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. A past recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and numerous other publications. He is the author of Beautiful Souls, a study of moral courage and individual acts of conscience, and Absolute Convictions, a narrative account of the abortion conflict.
Research
My project will examine the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society’s most ethically troubling functions: its dirty work. Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations, guards who enforce the rules in America’s violent, overcrowded prisons, roustabouts on the frontlines of the fossil fuel industry: these are among the workers whose stories will be told in Dirty Work, a nonfiction book that will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. What kind of emotional hardships and moral burdens do the workers who perform these jobs suffer? And why do these burdens encumber some people rather than others? As I will show, the dirty work in America is not randomly distributed, falling disproportionately to people with more limited choices and opportunities. It also disproportionately impacts certain regions of the country that come to depend on it even as they absorb its harmful effects – places like the Gulf, where oil and gas exploration is both a toxic threat to sensitive habitats and a vital source of jobs. Through fresh reporting and incisive analysis, Dirty Work will illuminate these disparities while shedding light on the structural forces that perpetuate dirty work in our society.
