Learn more about the Silas Peirce Lecture here. A livestream will be available.

For more than a decade, Sarah Stillman has reported for The New Yorker on the human toll of profiteering -- in prisons, jails, immigration detention facilities, and beyond. In her Silas Pierce lecture, she will explore the role that traditional investigative reporting can play in unearthing injustice, while also confronting its limits in a rapidly-shifting media landscape. As information ecosystems grow more siloed -- and misinformation more pervasive -- Stillman argues that new models of reporting are urgently needed: work that is more collaborative, experimental, and expansive in how it reaches diverse audiences. 

Drawing on recent reporting about the Trump Administration's mass deportations, Stillman will share her interviews with individuals subjected to ICE's secretive "third-country deportation" program -- an effort to deport people to high-risk countries with which they have no prior ties. The lecture asks how investigative journalism can adapt not only to expose hard-won truths in this fast-moving moment, but also, to sustain them -- in public memory, in the historical record, and in the lives of the people most affected.

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose investigative reporting explores how power and profit shape key American systems, including criminal justice, immigration, and climate policy. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the felony-murder doctrine, and her work has exposed the economic incentives embedded in punishment and governance -- from debtors' prisons and civil asset forfeiture to the exploitation of disaster-recovery workers amid the climate crisis. She has documented the human toll of mass deportation across multiple presidential administrations, including, most recently, conducting some of the first interviews with people deported by the Trump Administration to third countries where they had no prior ties and faced indefinite detention.  

Stillman teaches journalism as a Professor in the Practice at Yale University, where she also directs the Investigative Reporting Lab, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to collaborative public-interest storytelling. Previously, she ran the Global Migration Project at Columbia Journalism School; her work can be found in the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, as well as in multiple Best American Magazine Writing anthologies. She is a MacArthur Fellow. 

Price: Free