Press Freedom Under Attack: 21st Century Threats to Journalists and Democracy

Professor Nancy Amoury Combs, Ernest W. Goodrich Professor of Law and Director of the Human Security Law Center at William & Mary Law School

Teresa Longo, Associate Provost for International Affairs and Executive Director of the Reves Center for International Studies

Dr. Longo is the senior international officer at W&M. The associate provost also nurtures W&M’s external international academic partnerships. The role may also include outreach to federal agencies such as the national endowments for the humanities and the arts and the U.S. Department of Education. Teresa Longo is a Professor of Hispanic Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.A. and B.A from the University of Montana. Her scholarship focuses on the relationship between Latin America and the United States as it is articulated culturally. Longo’s publications include Visible Dissent: Latin American Writers, Small U.S. Presses, and the Political Imagination; “Humanity Rendered Visible: Literature, Art and the Post-9/11 Imagination;” and Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry. Her current research project centers on the literary legacy of copper mining in the Rocky Mountain West and in Chile.  Her courses engage the literary arts within a global studies framework. She teaches Local-Global Issues, Urban Images, and Issues in Canon Formation. In Spring ’22 she offered a seminar on Copper, Gold and Silver in Literature and Art.  Longo is the recipient of William & Mary’s Thomas Jefferson Award, a Jefferson Teaching Award, an Alumni Society Teaching Award, and a Plumeri Award; and she was recognized by the Case-Carnegie Foundation as a Virginia Professor of the Year.

Rachel Grady - Director, Executive Producer of Endangered: Journalism in Jeopardy

Rachel Grady is the co-director of JESUS CAMP (Academy Award nominee), THE BOYS OF BARAKA (Emmy nominee), 12TH & DELAWARE (Peabody Award winner), DETROPIA (Emmy winner), NORMAN LEAR: JUST ANOTHER VERSION OF YOU (2016 Sundance Film Festival), ONE OF US (2017 Toronto International Film Festival), and the Showtime docuseries, LOVE FRAUD, which had its world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. ENDANGERED (HBO) is Grady’s 6th feature documentary collaboration with Heidi Ewing and premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Festival. She is the co-owner of Brooklyn based Loki Films.

Carl-Philippe Juste - Photojournalist

Under the threat of persecution, Haitian-born Carl-Philippe Juste and his politically active family were forced to flee their homeland in 1965, eventually settling in Miami’s Haitian community. Since 1991, he has worked as an award-winning photojournalist for the Miami Herald. Juste has covered national and international stories for the Herald, including assignments in Haiti, Cuba, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. As part of his ongoing independent work, in 1998, Juste co-founded Iris Photo Collective. In 2016, Juste won a prestigious Knight Arts Challenge grant to complete Havana, Haiti: Two Cultures, One Community, a book and exhibit of photographs and essays about Cubans’ and Haitians’ lives and shared humanity. In 2019, Juste opened IPC ArtSpace in 2019 to further engage the public with the arts, and he won the Oolite Arts’ “The Ellies” award that same year and, again, in 2021.

Joel Simon - Author and Journalist

Joel Simon is an author, journalist, and press freedom advocate. He is currently a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute, also at Columbia. He is the author of four books, including most recently The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, co-authored with Robert Mahoney. He writes on press freedom issues for The New Yorker, and produces a regular column for Columbia Journalism Review. From 2006 until 2021, Joel served as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Moderator: Rachel Sleiman

Sleiman is a third-year William & Mary Law School student with an interest in human rights, free speech, and press freedom issues. Rachel serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Comparative Jurist, W&M’s international law blog, and is a member of the Bill of Rights Journal and Moot Court team. Rachel graduated with a bachelor’s degree in International Studies & Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University in 2015 and served as a paralegal for the Department of Justice’s Fraud Section for four years before pursuing her law degree.

Apar Gupta - Lawyer and Activist

Apar Gupta has worked for over 15 years as a lawyer, activist and writer on the intersection of technology and democratic rights in India. Qualified to practice law, he completed his masters degree from Columbia Law School, New York. As a lawyer, he worked on commercial arbitration and disputes in Karanjawala & Co. as an associate and then as a partner at Advani & Co. From 2013, he worked extensively at the intersection of technology and civil rights through strategic litigation in cases such as Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (Section 66A), Subramanium Swamy v. Union of India (criminal defamation), Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (Internet Shutdowns) and Justice Puttaswamy v. Union of India (Right to Privacy and Aadhaar). This is complemented with online campaigns and civic literacy efforts where he was a co-founder in the Network Neutrality campaign called the SaveTheInternet.in and for data protection laws under SaveOurPrivacy.in. He serves as the Executive Director of the Internet Freedom Foundation that runs the Digital Patrakar Defence Clinic (DPDC) for journalists.

Martin Plaut - Journalist and Academic

Natalie Southwick - Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator at the Committee to Project Journalists

Prior to joining CPJ as its Americas research associate in 2017, she was based in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was a member of Witness for Peace’s international accompaniment team, a reporting specialist with ACDI/VOCA’s Afro-Colombian and Indigenous program, and the editor of a website focused on Latin American news. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Chicago Reporter, InSight Crime, and RioOnWatch, among other publications. She has a master’s degree in international human rights from the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Moderator: Christopher Tyree - Journalist

Tyree is a Virginia native and the senior director and co-founder of the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism. For more than 30 years, his cameras and pen have carried him to report on stories on nearly every continent. His award-winning projects have helped shape policy and spur awareness of important issues. His work has been published in hundreds of the world’s leading periodicals and broadcast networks including the BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and Deutsche Welle. He earned a graduate degree in visual communication from Ohio University and BS in journalism from James Madison University.