Lovejoy Award Presentation and Address

Alissa Rubin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, will receive Colby College's Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism and will deliver the 2016 Lovejoy Convocation address at the ceremony. Lovejoy, Colby's valedictorian in 1826, became a crusading abolitionist editor and was murdered in 1837 for his anti-slavery editorials. He was called America's first martyr to freedom of the press by John Quincy Adams.

The award, presented annually by Colby since 1952, will honor Rubin for her intrepid reporting — often at great personal peril — in hotspots around the globe, from the Balkans to Baghdad. That work was interrupted briefly in 2014, when Rubin was severely injured in a helicopter accident while reporting in Iraq on the takeover of Northern Iraq by the Islamic State.

Now leading the Times' Paris bureau, Rubin was also bureau chief for the paper in the Iraqi capital and in Kabul, where she often reported on the constrained lives of Afghan women. Her foreign reporting began as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times from the Balkans, where she covered the fighting in Macedonia and post-conflict stresses in the rest of the former Yugoslavia.

In addition to the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, which she will accept at Columbia University later in the week, Rubin has also won the Overseas Press Award, the John Chancellor Award, and the Michael J. Kelly Award. She is a graduate of Brown University.