KINGSTON, R.I.–September 23, 2009 – Award-winning freelance journalist Elizabeth Rubin, will speak at the University of Rhode Island Wednesday, Oct. 14 at 7 p.m. in White Hall, 2 Heathman Road, Kingston. Her talk, free and open to the public, is the second annual Amanpour Lecture.

Rubin is an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. She covers the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for that publication, as well as, for The New Republic. She has written for other major national and international publications and has appeared on such networks as C-SPAN, CNN, PBS, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, NPR, and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Rubin is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2008 1st Prize Bayeux-Calvados for War Correspondents, the 2005 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and the 2004 Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Travel Writing for “The Road to Herat,” in The Atlantic Monthly.

She earned her undergraduate degree at Columbia University and her doctorate in Renaissance literature and history at Oxford University, Balliol College, England.

She speaks, reads, and writes French, reads Arabic, and has basic street-level speaking and comprehension of Serbo-Croat.

CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, a 1983 URI alumna and 1995 honorary degree recipient, endows the annual speaker series, designed to help the University bring well-respected professional journalists to campus.

Amanpour is married to Jamie Rubin, former spokesperson for the State Department. Elizabeth Rubin is his sister. The event is coordinated by URI’s Journalism Department.