As senior European correspondent for National Public Radio's Foreign Desk, Sylvia Poggioli has covered news from hot spots around the globe for more than two decades. Whether reporting from Rome, the Balkans, or the Middle East, Poggioli provides expert analysis on NPR's award-winning programs Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.
On Wednesday, May 12, Poggioli will present a free public lecture titled "TransAtlantic Tensions: The Growing Divide" at 7:30 p.m. at the Rio Theater in Santa Cruz (1205 Soquel Avenue).
She will appear as part of the University of California Regents' Lecturers Program, which brings distinguished professionals from non-academic fields to the campus in an effort to broaden the educational experience of students. Poggioli will participate in seminars, colloquia and informal consultations with students and faculty during a weeklong residency at UCSC.
Since she began working for NPR in 1982 as a freelance reporter from Rome, Poggioli has reported on events ranging from the fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the civil war in Yugoslavia, to the Gulf War in the Middle East. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the George Foster Peabody Award for reporting on the conflict in Bosnia (1993), and the Dupont Columbia Award for NPR's coverage of the Gulf War (1992).
In 1994, Poggioli was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her "distinctive, cultivated and authoritative reports on 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia." She also received the Emma Award that year from the Congressional Women's Caucus/Radcliffe College for reporting on rape victims in Bosnia, and the Silver Angel Excellence in Media Award the following year for her coverage of religious relations in Sarajevo.
The daughter of Italian antifascists who fled Italy in the Mussolini era, Poggioli grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in romance languages and literature. She began her journalism career in Rome with the English language service of the Ansa news agency, where she served as an editor from 1971 to 1986. Prior to that, Poggioli was active in women's film and theater groups and worked at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy.
In 1990, Poggioli spent an academic year as a research fellow at Harvard University's Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. In early 1991, she supplemented NPR's Gulf War coverage, reporting from London on European reactions to events surrounding the war.
Poggioli was part of the NPR team that won the 2000 Overseas Press Club award for coverage of NATO's 1999 air war against Yugoslavia. In 2000, she received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Brandeis University, and in 2002, the Welles Hangen Award for Superior Achievement in Journalism from Brown University.
Poggioli's lecture is sponsored by UCSC's Office of the Chancellor; the Committee on Regents' Professors and Lecturers; the Department of Literature; the Division of Humanities; the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research; the Institute for Humanities Research; the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community; the Center for Cultural Studies; the Department of History; and radio stations KZSC, KUSP, and KAZU.
For more information, contact Pam Lawson at: paml@ucsc.edu.
