This recurring annual fellowship will bring prominent and courageous activists, journalists, and scholars from across the globe to WCED both as a way of evading persecution in their home countries and of sharing their unique personal insights with the U-M community and broader public on how dictatorships and eroding democracies repress vital individual freedoms.
Elena Milashina joins WCED as the inaugural Freedoms Under Fire Residency Fellow.
Elena Milashina is a journalist for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most prominent independent newspaper. She covers human rights violations in Russia’s North Caucasus Republics and brings attention to accounts of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial executions, torture, and persecution committed by governmental agents. She also writes about women’s and LGBTQ rights in Russia.
As an investigative journalist, she has received numerous awards, including the Human Rights Watch’s Alison Des Forges Award for Extraordinary Activism, the International Woman of Courage Award, and the Prize for Courage by Reporters Without Borders. She was a 2009-2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.
At WCED, Elena will conduct collaborative research on the Russian government’s suppression of independent news outlets with a specific focus on exposing human rights abuses. Read more about Elena and the Freedoms Under Fire Residency fellowship here.
