Janine di Giovanni served as a Jackson Senior Fellow from 2018-2022. She has reported some of the world’ most violent conflicts and wars for three decades, investigating and documenting human rights abuse in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. She is currently directing a project sponsored by the UN Democracy Fund that promotes transitional justice in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria called Enabling Witnesses, working with Yale Jackson MA students. In 2019, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her life time research in the Middle East, and in 2020, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters highest prize for non-fiction, the Blake Dodd, for her body of work spanning 30 years. She is a multi-award winning writer and author, currently Global Affairs columnist for Foreign Policy Magazine and The National, in Abu Dhabi, as well as a contributor to the Washington Post, the New York Times and many other publications.
Her ninth book, “The Vanishing: Faith, Loss and the Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East” will be published by Public Affairs in October 2021. The writer Salman Rushdie has described it as : “A tragic portrait of a disappearing world, created with all of the great Di Giovanni di Giovanni’s passion and literary grace.” From 2017 to 2018, Di Giovanni was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Administration. She is also the author of the award-winning book, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria, which has been translated into 25 languages and was deemed “searing and necessary” by the New York Times.
Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 2017, Di Giovanni was the Middle East Editor at Newsweek reporting on international security, human rights and transitional justice. She was the Senior Foreign Correspondent for the Times of London for many years, witnessing the fall of Grozny, the siege of Sarajevo, the Rwandan and Srebrenica genocides. As a 2016 Pakis Scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Di Giovanni focused on international law and international security. Prior to that, she was a contributing editor for two decades at Vanity Fair where she won the National Magazine Award for Reporting, and many other awards.
She has investigated human rights abuse and analyzed conflict on four continents, and has consulted for UNICEF, UNHCR, OHRHR, the World Bank and others. She is the subject of two long-format documentaries, including the widely acclaimed 7 Days in Syria and Bearing Witness. Her TED talk “What I Saw in the War” has received over 1 million views on YouTube. In 2016, she was awarded the International Women Media Foundation’s prestigious COURAGE Award.
Di Giovanni is also non-resident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Associate Fellow at The Geneva Centre for Security Policy. She is a former Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, given in recognition of her work with victims of war trauma. Di Giovanni has won more than fifteen major awards for her extensive work in conflict zones and during humanitarian crisis in Palestine/Israel, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, UAE, Algeria, Turkey, Greece, Vietnam, and other countries.
She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She carries British, French and American nationalities and lives with her son, Luca Costantino Girodon, in Manhattan.