Philippe Lançon, an incoming visiting fellow in the Program in Latin American Studies for the 2015-16 school year, was critically injured in Wednesday’s attack on the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. He remains in critical, but stable, condition at a hospital in Paris.
It remains unclear if he will still be teaching at the University next academic year.
Lançon, a staff writer for the magazine, was attending a weekly staff editorial team meeting at the magazine’s headquarters when the two gunmen broke into the room and began firing, according to an email sent by Spanish and Portuguese professor Rubén Gallo to the University faculty. In an interview, Gallo said that Lançon suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the face, but that none of the bullets reached his brain.
Gallo noted that Lançon was the only survivor of the editorial team meeting, and that he has already undergone several operations to restore his face, but added that it was going to be a slow and complicated recovery process for him.
Lançon attended these weekly meetings as a staff writer for the magazine.
“It’s very sad for our program and the University,” Gallo said. “We were shocked and saddened to hear the news.”
As a visiting fellow, Lancon was to teach a course titled, “Writers and Dictators in Latin America,” next fall and spend the next school year writing and researching a new book on Cuba at the University.
In addition to being a staff writer at Charlie Hebdo, Lançon is also a well-noted literature critic at Libération, a French newspaper, and has conducted a number of interviews with well-known Latin American authors and writers, including Jorge Edwards Valdés and former University visiting professor Mario Vargas Llosa, according to Gallo’s email.
Lançon’s most recent work was covering the developments in the thawing of US-Cuban relations. His last published article was an interview with visual artist Tania Bruguera after she was detained in Havana by Cuban authorities.
“It’s very sad what has happened to Philippe, but we hope that he will be able to teach this fall and still be a part of our program. Here at PLAS, we are going to do everything we can to make sure this can happen and help him through this. It will be our modest contribution to freedom of the press,” Gallo said.
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