A well-known commentator on contemporary thought, politics and culture, Hitchens has written more than a dozen books and corresponded from more than 60 countries. He has contributed regularly to the Atlantic, Slate, Vanity Fair, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Washington Post Book World, the Nation, the National Review and the New Left Review, among other media outlets. Honored frequently for his reporting and the literary quality of his prose, Hitchens received a National Magazine Award in 2007 and was a finalist for a 2007 National Book Award. He appears frequently on radio and television broadcasts.

BACKGROUND: Daniel Pearl was a prominent Wall Street Journal reporter and the paper's South Asia bureau chief when he was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002. Pearl's father, Judea Pearl, a computer science professor at UCLA, and his family established the Daniel Pearl Foundation to promote and continue Daniel's mission of fostering cross-cultural understanding throughout the world. The lecture series, established at UCLA in 2002, features scholars, journalists and policymakers who have contributed original analyses or constructive approaches to problems of international concern. Previous presenters of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture have included Anderson Cooper, David Brooks, Ted Koppel, Larry King, Jeff Greenfield, Daniel Schorr and Thomas Friedman. In 2006, a parallel lecture series was established at Stanford University, which has featured Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Philip Zimbardo, Bernard-Henri Lvy and Christiane Amanpour.