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Tyrants & Rebels: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon

Register here [1].

Three acclaimed journalists discuss the situation in the Middle East.

About this Event

Three acclaimed journalists – former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times Robert F. Worth; award-winning film and print journalist and 2019-20 Nieman Fellow Rania Abouzeid; and award-winning former Iraq correspondent and current Nieman Fellow Alissa J. Rubin – discuss the situation in the Middle East with former editor of the New York Times and Senior Lecturer in the English Department, Jill Abramson.

About the Speakers

Rania Abouzeid [2] is a Beirut-based journalist and author of No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria [3](2018). She has covered wars, natural disasters and political upheaval across the Middle East and South Asia for more than 15 years and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Michael Kelly Award, the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting and the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Book Award. Abouzeid has written for The New Yorker, Time, National Geographic and other publications, and has reported and presented television documentaries and features. She has received fellowships from the European Council on Foreign Relations, New America and Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Alissa J. Rubin [4] is the Baghdad Bureau chief for The New York Times. She joined The New York Times in January 2007 as a correspondent in Baghdad and covered Iraq and Afghanistan, becoming bureau chief in Baghdad in the fall of 2008, and then moving to Afghanistan in October 2009, becoming bureau chief there a couple of months later. She has received many honors for her work, including: a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting; the 2015 John Chancellor Award for journalistic achievement; a 2010 Overseas Press Association award for a piece on women suicide bombers titled “How Baida Wanted to Die”; and a 1992 Washington Monthly award for a piece that appeared in the Washington City Paper, “What People Talk About When They Talk About Abortion.”

Robert F. Worth [5] is the author of A Rage for Order [6], a New York Times Notable Book of 2016. He spent fourteen years as a correspondent for The New York Times, and was the paper’s Beirut bureau chief from 2007 until 2011. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books. He has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

Moderated by Jill Abramson [8], Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Harvard. She is a journalist who spent 17 years in senior editorial positions at The New York Times, where she was the first woman to serve as Washington bureau chief (2000-03), managing editor (2003-11) and executive editor (2011-14). She is the author of Merchants of Truth [9] (2019).

About the Series

Writers Speak [10], a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center, is convened by Claire Messud [11], a novelist and Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University.