Stony Brook Graduate Receives First Marie Colvin Fellowship

Crossing borders to find and report stories with global impact, student journalist Hanaa’ Tameez ’16 will travel to Mexico as recipient of the first Marie Colvin Fellowship, awarded through Stony Brook’s School of Journalism in honor of fallen Sunday Times war correspondent Colvin.

Hanaa’ Tameez ’16

Tameez, a double major in journalism and Spanish and former editor of the campus newspaper The Statesman, will travel to Mexico City for a 10-week reporting assignment with The Wall Street Journal.

“I don’t think I could have asked for a better result after graduation,” Tameez said.

The Marie Colvin Fellowship honors the journalistic ideals of acclaimed international correspondent Marie Colvin, who was killed in 2012 while covering the conflict in Syria for the Sunday Times of London, the weekly paper owned by News Corp. During the nearly two decades she worked at The Times, she covered thousands of stories, traversing the globe from Chechnya to Sri Lanka to the Middle East.

Shortly after Colvin’s death, Stony Brook University, with the support of the Colvin family, established the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting to nurture and train the next generation of international reporters. Marie Colvin was a Long Island native who grew up approximately 30 miles from the university. She was known for her moving accounts of innocent civilians caught in the tide of war, and for her courage, tenacity and indefatigable commitment to truth.

Marie Colvin

“We are dedicated to preserving Marie Colvin’s legacy and nurturing in the next generation of journalists the kind of tenacity and commitment to ground truth that Marie embodied,” said Stony Brook School of Journalism Dean Howard Schneider. “This award helps make that possible.”

The fellowship will give one outstanding graduating senior or master’s student the opportunity to work at one of the Journal’s international bureaus. A faculty selection committee chose finalists for the award, and Journal editors selected the winner.

Tameez will work both independently and as part of a team alongside beat reporters and editors, covering news events, producing stories for print and online in real time, and helping to produce online graphics and, on occasion, video elements. There will be opportunities to undertake broader enterprise reporting projects.