Soad Hussein Hassan Global Scholar Lecture featuring Christina Lamb

On April 8, 2021, in recognition of International Women’s Day and Sexual Assault Awareness month, the Center for Global Women’s Health and the office of Global Health Affairs presented the Soad Hussein Hassan Global Scholar Lecture featuring Christina Lamb, author of Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women. Christina gives voice to women in conflict, exposing the world’s most neglected war crime— the use of rape in modern warfare as a weapon to humiliate, terrify, and carry out ethnic cleansing.

Christina Lamb is one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents and a bestselling author. She has reported from most of the world’s hotspots but her particular passions are Afghanistan and Pakistan which she has covered since an unexpected wedding invitation led her to Karachi in 1987 when she was just 21.

Within two years she had been named Young Journalist of the Year. Since then she has won numerous awards including five times being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year and Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2013 and has won Amnesty International’s Newspaper Journalist of the Year for reporting from inside Libyan detention centres.

Currently Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, her postings have included South Africa, Pakistan, Brazil and Washington and she has recently reported on the refugee crisis across Europe and camps for women enslaved by Boko Haram in Nigeria and ISIS in Iraq.

She has written nine books including the bestselling The Africa House and I Am Malala and is a patron of Afghan Connection and on the board of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting. Her latest books are Nujeen; One Girl’s Incredible Journey from War-torn Syria in a Wheelchair and Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women.

This event was made possible by the Soad Hussein Hassan Fund, established in 2012 by U.S. Ambassador Martin J. Silverstein, ret., GL’08, and Audrey J. Silverstein, C’82. Named in memory of Dr. Soad Hussein Hassan, mother of former Penn Nursing Dean Afaf I. Meleis, the fund creates an opportunity each year for global scholars or experts to take part in school-based programs, lectures, and classes, and to collaborate with Penn Nursing’s faculty and students.

Additional support was provided by our Penn Campus sponsors: Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality, and Women, the Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, Ortner Center on Violence & Abuse, Penn in Latin America & The Caribbean (PLAC), Penn LGBT Center, Penn Libraries, Penn Violence Prevention, Penn Women’s Center, and the PSOM Center for Global Health.

A donation for this speaking engagement was made to the Panzi Foundation, founded by Nobel Laureate, Dr. Denis Mukwege who was the 2016 recipient of Penn Nursing’s Renfield Award.

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