Fellowship opportunity for female journalists

Women journalists committed to human rights and social justice reporting are invited to apply for a fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology´s Center for International Studies. The Washington-based  International Women´s Media Foundation has announced the Elisabeth Neuffer Fellowship that gives the selected journalist a chance to complete research at the MIT. It also includes internships with The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Due to the pandemic, the 2021-2022 fellowship may take place in-person or virtually. How to handle this will be decided by the Foundation prior to the Fellowship start date.

The Elisabeth Neuffer Fellowship was set up to honour American journalist Elizabeth Neuffer who was specialized in covering war crimes, human rights abuses, and post-conflict societies. She died at the age of 46 in a car accident while covering the Iraq War in 2003.

Neuffer began her career with The Boston Globe in the Washington bureau. She also reported from Moscow on the breakup of the Soviet Union and from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq during the Gulf War.

She served as the European Bureau Chief from 1994 to 1998 in Berlin. During that time, she covered the Balkan wars etc. Neuffer dedicated almost a year to exclusively reporting about war crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda.

In 1998, she won a Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Eligibility Criteria for the fellowship:

• The Neuffer Fellowship is open to women and non-binary journalists whose work focuses on human rights and social justice issues.
• All applicants for the Neuffer Fellowship must be working journalists with at least three years of full-time, professional journalism experience. Internships and journalism-related work completed as a university student do not count as professional experience. Applicants may be affiliated or freelance journalists.
• Journalists from any country around the world are eligible to apply. However, applicants must speak, read, and write English fluently in order to fully participate in and benefit from the Fellowship.

Deadline for applications is February 25 at 11.59 PM EST