Allan Thompson

Program Director

Allan Thompson has been the head of Carleton University’s journalism program since 2020. He joined Carleton in 2003 after 17 years as a reporter with the Toronto Star, where he specialized in covering foreign policy, defence and immigration. It was during his time as a reporter in The Star’s Ottawa bureau that Thompson began reporting on Romeo Dallaire, documenting Dallaire’s journey from the time he left his command in Rwanda, through the descent into post-traumatic stress disorder, his re-emergence on the public stage as a champion for war-affected children and during Dallaire’s key witness testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Thompson published an edited collection called The Media and the Rwanda Genocide and also established and managed a five-year media development project in Rwanda called The Rwanda Initiative. He is also a co-author of the journalism text The Canadian Reporter. His most recent publication is the edited collection Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond.