Speakers

Jerome Aumente is distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Communication and Information (SC&I) at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He devotes his time to writing and to regional, national and international assignments as a media consultant specializing in journalism and mass communications training and university curriculum development. He has extensive experience in the international training of journalists; joint curriculum development with universities internationally and in the United States; health communication; the Internet and newer media technologies; investigative and enterprise reporting; business, economic and financial reporting.

He is special counselor to the dean of SC&I, and a member of the SC&I Advisory Board. He was founding director of the Journalism Resources Institute (JRI), where he is senior research associate, and was founder and former chairperson of the department of journalism and media studies.  The Journalism Resources Institute trained over 14,000 print and broadcast journalists under his direction, with over $2 million in media training and journalism projects in Central and Eastern Europe. Under his leadership, the JRI ran special projects in international affairs, journalism and mass communications; new media technologies; health, medical, and environmental coverage; media and law; the evaluation of professional training of journalists; and business and financial journalism. 

Aumente has published four books with the most recent, “From Ink on Paper to the Internet”, winning the Society of Professional Journalists national award for journalism research in 2008. His earlier books examine journalism in Eastern Europe, the development of electronic publishing, and a guide for young people examining misinformation in the media. He was a 1968 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.


Nolan Bowie is adjunct lecturer in public policy and a senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. From 1986 to 1998 he was an associate professor at Temple University's School of Communication and Theater. His primary policy concerns are issues regarding equity and fairness in the allocation of and access to information (literacy, education, and knowledge) in all formats via digital and analog communication technology.

Bowie is a former public interest communications lawyer who has been teaching, writing, and advocating on behalf of underrepresented constituencies for more than 35 years. He also is a self-taught artist who has served as a naval officer, juvenile probation counselor, New York State assistant attorney general for civil rights and an assistant Watergate special prosecutor. He received his law degree in 1973 from the University of Michigan Law School.


Stefan Candea is a freelance journalist and co-founder of the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism in Bucharest, Romania. As an investigative journalist for the Evenimentul Zilei newspaper in Bucharest, he wrote about the connections between international organized crime networks and high-ranking politicians and public servants. One article showed the links between La Cosa Nostra and associates of the Romanian president and the foreign secret service director. Other investigations by Candea have included the international arms trade, illegal international adoption, an investigation of the separatist region of Trans-Dniester and the diamond business in Romania.

Candea has worked for Deutsche Welle, in print, radio, TV and online, and he did freelance research and production work for several foreign media outlets, including the BBC, Channel 4, ITN, ZDF and Canal Plus. Since March 2001, he has been a correspondent for Reporters sans Frontieres in Romania. Candea is a member of the International Consortium for Investigative Journalism and has won several awards including the IRE Tom Renner Award and the Overseas Press Club of America Award for online journalism. He teaches investigative journalism at Bucharest University and is currently the 2011 Carroll Binder Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.


Timothy J. Colton is Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies and the chair of the department of government. His main interest is Russian and post-Soviet government and politics. He is the author of "The Dilemma of Reform in the Soviet Union" (1986); "Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis" (1995), which was named best scholarly book in government and political science by the Association of American Publishers; "Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia" (2000); "Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000" (with Michael McFaul, 2003); and "Boris Yeltsin: A Life" (2008). He is currently working on a project on the international politics of the post-Soviet space.


Grzegorz Ekiert is professor of government and senior scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His teaching and research interests focus on comparative politics, regime change and democratization, civil society and social movements, and East European politics and societies.

He is the author of "The State Against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East Central Europe" (1996); "Rebellious Civil Society: Popular Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Poland" (with Jan Kubik, 1999); "Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule" (co-edited with Stephen Hanson, 2003); and editor of special issues of East European Politics & Societies on "The Next Great Transformation: The EU Eastward Enlargement" (with Jan Zielonka, 2003) and on "Democracy in the Post-Communist World: An Unending Quest?" (2007). His papers have appeared in numerous social science journals and edited volumes. His current projects explore civil society development in new democracies in Central Europe and East Asia and patterns of transformations in the post-communist world. 

Ekiert was acting director of Harvard’s Center for European Studies in fall 2010. He also is senior faculty associate at the Davis Center for Russian Studies and a member of the Club of Madrid Advisory Committee.


Bob Giles has been curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard since 2000. Immediately prior to joining the foundation, Giles was senior vice president of the Freedom Forum and executive director of its Media Studies Center in New York City. Previously, he had been editor and publisher of The Detroit News. From 1977 to 1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor of the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y.

Giles began his career in 1958 at the Akron Beacon Journal. As managing editor there in 1970, he directed coverage of the campus shootings at Kent State, for which the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize. Also under his editorship, The Detroit News won a Pulitzer in 1994 for the paper's disclosures of a scandal in the Michigan House Fiscal Agency. Giles is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize juror and is the author of "Newsroom Management: A Guide to Theory and Practice."

He is a graduate of DePauw University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and was a 1966 Nieman Fellow. He received an honorary doctorate in journalism from DePauw in 1996 and also won the Scripps-Howard Foundation's Distinguished Journalism Citation in 1978 for "outstanding public service in the cause of the First Amendment."


Peter Gross is the director of the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Multilingual, Gross has carried out research, lectured, consulted and presented conference papers in Western and East/Central Europe, in some former Soviet republics, Taiwan, India, China and Cuba.

The author/co-author of several scholarly books and textbooks, and dozens of book chapters and articles published in American and European journals, he is the recipient of numerous fellowships, research, lecture and training awards and grants. In 1996, he was a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Gross’s scholarly interests are focused on mass media and journalism in Eastern European countries. He earned his graduate degrees at the University of Iowa.


Sarah Mendelson currently serves as the deputy assistant administrator for USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA) responsible for democracy and governance. She joined the Obama administration in this role in May 2010. 

Prior to her current position, Mendelson was the director of the Human Rights and Security Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She has worked for nearly two decades on a wide variety of issues related to human rights and democracy including in Moscow as a program officer with the National Democratic Institute in 1994 and 1995.

Before coming to CSIS, she was a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. At CSIS, she conducted over a dozen public opinion surveys in Russia, tracking views on Chechnya, HIV/AIDS, military and police abuse, religious identity in the North Caucasus, as well as knowledge and experiences with human trafficking. She has researched the links between human trafficking and peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, and her work helped shape U.S. legislation and policies at NATO on this issue. In 2007-2008, she led a working group on closing Guantánamo, the recommendations from which were reflected in the Executive Orders signed January 22, 2009. In summer 2009, she helped convene the Parallel Civil Society Summit in Moscow during President Obama’s trip to Russia.

Mendelson received her B.A. in history from Yale University and her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. She has held fellowships at Stanford University and Princeton University. She serves on the editorial board of International Security and was a member of the advisory committee for the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A frequent contributor to the media, she has authored numerous peer-reviewed and public policy articles in addition to "Changing Course: Ideas, Politics and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan" (Princeton University Press, 1998); "The Power and Limits of NGOs: Transnational Networks and Post-Communist Societies" (Columbia University Press, 2002); "Barracks and Brothels: Peacekeepers and Human Trafficking in the Balkans" (CSIS Press, 2005); and "From Assistance to Engagement: A Model for a New Era in U.S.-Russian Civil Society Relations" (CSIS Press, 2009).


Joshua Rubenstein is the Northeast regional director of Amnesty International USA and a longtime associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He has been a staff member of Amnesty International since 1975. His current responsibilities include organizing Amnesty’s grassroots membership in New England, New York and New Jersey.

He is the author of "Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights" and "Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg," a biography of the controversial Soviet-Jewish writer and journalist. He is the co-editor of "Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee." Rubenstein received a National Jewish Book Award in the category of East European studies for "Stalin's Secret Pogrom." He is the co-editor of "The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov." He also helped to edit and translate "The Unknown Black Book, the Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories," which first came out in January 2008 and was re-issued in paperback in 2010.

Rubenstein’s latest book is a concise biography of Leon Trotsky for the "Jewish Lives" series at Yale University Press. It is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2011.


Maria Sadovskaya is a Belarusian journalist with 12 years of professional experience. She wrote for the international affairs section of independent weekly "Belarusians and Market" before moving in 2006 to Warsaw to work for European Radio for Belarus, an exiled broadcasting project targeting the youth audience. Currently she is studying for a master's degree at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and her research is related to the phenomenon of exiled media in the modern world.


Gwen Thompkins is a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Before coming to Cambridge for her fellowship, she was an NPR foreign correspondent covering East Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. On assignment, she covered the countries, people and happenings from the Horn to the heart of Africa. After arriving in Africa in 2006, Thompkins reported on the toppling of the Islamic Courts Union government in Somalia, ethnic violence in Kenya, insecurity in Darfur and Sudan’s first nationwide elections in a generation. She also wrote a series on the Nile River, traveling from the shores of Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea. Heading south, she has reported stories from South Africa and Antarctica. From 1996 to 2006, Thompkins was senior editor of “Weekend Edition Saturday.” While at “Weekend Edition,” Thompkins also reported from her hometown of New Orleans. In the months following Hurricane Katrina, she and senior producer Sarah Beyer Kelly filed stories on the aftermath of the storm and the rebuilding efforts. Before joining NPR, Thompkins worked as a reporter and editor at The Times-Picayune. A graduate of Newcomb College at Tulane University, she majored in history and Soviet studies. While on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, she was in Eastern Europe when the Berlin Wall fell.


Maxim Trudolyubov, a 2011 Nieman Fellow, is editorial page editor of Vedomosti, Russia’s most influential, independent business daily. In that role since 2003, Trudolyubov has significantly furthered professional journalistic standards in Russia, nurturing and creating open, informed political debate among the public intellectual elite. His weekly column often addresses profound social and political issues such as changing values in Russian society. He also has co-anchored a weekly talk show on Ekho Moskvy, one of the few editorially independent radio stations in Russia. Previously, Trudolyubov was foreign editor for Vedomosti, foreign editor and correspondent for Kapital, and a translator for Moscow News.