Janine di Giovanni is a Senior Fellow teaching human rights and assisting in the launch of the Human Rights program in Fall 2025. She was a previous Senior Fellow at Yale from 2018-2022.

Di Giovanni is the CEO/Executive Director and co-Founder of The Reckoning Project, a war crimes unit operating in Ukraine, Darfur and soon Gaza and Syria funded by the governments of the U.S., E.U., Sweden, Finland, and Germany; and private donors including OSF and Howard Buffet. She is an award-winning author, war reporter, and human rights expert with over 35 years of field experience, specializing in war crimes, democracy, transitional justice, and accountability. She has reported from 18 war zones and covered three genocides: Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Yezidi slaughter. Her regional expertise spans the Middle East, Balkans, Ukraine/Russia, and Africa, with a strong focus on Women, Peace, and Security and civilian protection.

Di Giovanni has served as an advisor to UNHCR on the Syria conflict and has provided policy guidance to the EU, NATO, and senior government officials. She was also a delegate at William Hague’s London Conference on Sexual Violence in Conflict. She has been a delegate to the World Economic Forum and the Munich Security Conference. Her work exposing war crimes has had a global impact, earning her over a dozen journalism and human rights awards. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in reducing armed violence (AOAV) and won the Guggenheim Fellowship while she was at Yale Jackson previously; the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Award; two Amnesty International Prizes; and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her lifetime body of work. She has won numerous journalistic prizes as well, including the National Magazine Award for Reporting (Kosovo) and Foreign Correspondent of the Year (UK) for Chechnya. Her work has had a resounding impact on governmental policy, most notably in Bosnia, Africa, and the Middle East.

In addition to Yale Jackson, di Giovanni has held senior fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations (Edward R. Murrow Fellow), Johns Hopkins’ Stavros Niarchos Agora Institute, and Tufts’ Fletcher School. She was also a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Schell Center for Human Rights and is currently a non-resident International Security Fellow at New America and Geneva Center for Security Policy. She also currently serves on David Miliband’s Atlas of Impunity Advisory Board.

Di Giovanni is the author of nine books, including The Vanishing, about Christians in the Middle East, and The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, hailed as “necessary and devastating” by The New York Times, translated into 28 languages, and shortlisted for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. She is a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, a Global Affairs columnist for The National (Dubai), and has previously been the Middle East editor at Newsweek and the senior foreign correspondent for The Times of London.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a multinational, she lives in Paris and is the mother of one son, Yale student Luca Girodon.