Panel of Women Foreign Correspondents To Speak at University Club Jan. 27

Christine Spolar

The University of Pittsburgh Honors College will host a panel presentation titled “Foreign Correspondents: Women in Danger,” featuring an international panel of seasoned foreign correspondents who have been stationed in some of the world’s hot spots, at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 27 in the University Club, Ballroom A.

Panelists are Nadia Trinidad, ABS-CBN senior political correspondent; Firle Davies, BBC reporter and producer; and Tara Mahtafar, PBS Frontline managing editor. Christine Spolar, senior editor at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund in Washington, D.C., will moderate the discussion.

Those interested in attending this free public event must RSVP by e-mail to uhcevent@pitt.edu (preferred) or call 412-624-2654, providing name, phone number, and requested number of tickets, which will be available at the door.

Trinidad began her journalism career as a reporter for the Associated Broadcasting Co. and moved to the Philippines’ largest network, ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp., in 1988. Since then, Trinidad, who is based in Manila, has covered bombings, the rise and fall of presidents, impeachment attempts, and the corruption scandals hounding that nation’s current administration. She is a Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

Davies, a journalist for more than 20 years, started her career covering civil wars and humanitarian emergencies in Africa for Visnews, now owned by Reuters. Since 2000, Davies has worked for the BBC, reporting for domestic and world service radio and domestic and world television while also producing online and current affairs documentaries. She has worked in Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Sudan. She is the International Women’s Media Foundation’s current Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow.

Mahtafar is the managing editor of the Tehran Bureau for PBS’ Frontline and a contributor to The Century Foundation’s Inside Iran program. Now based in Washington, D.C., Mahtafar worked as a journalist in Tehran for several years, covering last summer’s Iranian elections and post-election events. She has written on Iran for the Christian Science Monitor, Aljazeera International, and The Independent.

Spolar has been a chronicler of world events in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa for the past two decades. As a correspondent for The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune and a producer at CBS, Spolar has covered long-running conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. She has been assigned to posts in Warsaw, London, Ljubljana, Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Rome.