Binghamton University to honor award-winning author and journalist with The Nadia Rubaii Memorial Award

Binghamton University’s Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) will award the Nadia Rubaii Memorial Prize at 4:30 p.m. Friday, April 10, in the First Floor Atrium at the University Downtown Center (UDC) at this year’s Frontiers of Prevention Conference. The event is free and open to the public.

The Nadia Rubaii Memorial Award is presented on the first day of The Frontiers of Prevention Conference, an annual international forum hosted by I-GMAP since 2017 which brings together academic researchers and prevention practitioners from governments, international organizations and civil society. The two-day event will start on Friday and continue on Saturday, April 11, at UDC.

This year’s recipient, M. Gessen, is an opinion columnist for The New York Times and an award-winning author who uses their platform to highlight the risks that people are facing in the United States. Gessen’s 2020 book, Surviving Autocracy, expands on their essay, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” which went viral after President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. The presentation of the award will be followed by a public lecture from Gessen titled “What a Dissident Sees.”

The Nadia Rubaii Memorial Award is named in honor of Nadia Rubaii, I-GMAP co-founder, former co-director and professor and practitioner of public administration at Binghamton University. Rubaii dedicated decades of service to helping universities and public service organizations better serve diverse publics, be interculturally effective and promote social equity.

The Nadia Rubaii Memorial Award is presented annually to an individual or organization who best represents Rubaii’s commitment to the promotion of human rights and the prevention of genocide, mass atrocities and all forms of identity-based violence.

M. Gessen is the author of 11 books, including the National Book Award-winning, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia and The New York Times best-seller, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

Gessen was born in Moscow, Russia, and immigrated to the United States at 14, but returned 10 years later as a journalist. After being dismissed as editor from a popular science magazine, Gessen founded Russian Independent Media Archive (now Kronika) to digitally preserve independent Russian journalism produced over the last 20 years.

They moved to New York in 2013 after their family was targeted by an anti-LGBTQ campaign, and spent seven years as a staff writer for The New York Times, and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Harper’s and Vanity Fair. They were recognized with the George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. In addition, Gessen is a distinguished professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College.

Throughout the two-day event, academics, researchers and practitioners will engage in conversations, share notes and experiences and form new professional connections. Frontier of Prevention is a workshop-style conference featuring several extended thematic sessions that allow participants and audience members to explore topics in depth, connect across different thematic panels, pursue collaborations and test new ideas.